Building Developer Communities with Domitrius Clark from Xata
Dom Clark from Xata shares insights on building developer communities, reflecting on his experiences with meetups, DevRel, and Slack vs. Discord
Episode Description
Domitrius Clark shares his journey from bootcamp grad to DX leader, discussing community building, DevRel burnout, and why Discord beats Slack.
Episode Summary
In this live episode of JavaScript Jam recorded at Render ATL, hosts Scott Steinlage and Anthony Campolo sit down with Domitrius Clark, a developer experience professional at Zeta (or Zada, depending on your pronunciation). Dom traces his path from retail worker and bootcamp graduate to community builder and DX leader, explaining how founding Reactadelphia helped dozens of developers in Philadelphia land jobs and launched his own career. He credits early mentors like Tyler McGinnis, Andrew Mead, and Kent Dodds, emphasizing that aspiring developers should never hesitate to reach out to prominent figures in the space. The conversation shifts to community platform strategy, where Dom makes a passionate case for Discord over Slack, citing better moderation tools and privacy protections, while acknowledging Discord's own UX shortcomings like its underutilized Inbox feature. He then unpacks the real function of DevRel, arguing that teams are chronically underutilized when treated as content machines rather than cross-functional contributors who serve as "customer zero" for product feedback. Dom highlights the burnout problem inherent in DevRel's endless context switching and advocates for adding dedicated project managers to DevRel orgs. The episode closes with advice on providing genuine community value through education, ecosystem support, and meaningful ambassador programs rather than chasing vanity metrics.
Chapters
00:00:00 - Introductions and Dom's Origin Story
The episode opens live from Render ATL with Scott, Anthony, and guest Domitrius Clark trading jokes about the pronunciation of Zeta before settling into Dom's background. Dom shares that he's a career transitioner and bootcamp graduate from the Philadelphia area who got his start at a tiny three-person startup called Red Queen, where he built React tooling for second-screen gaming applications.
Dom explains how his retail experience at Vans taught him relationship-building skills that directly translated to tech, pushing back against the common advice to strip non-tech jobs from resumes. He argues that everything in your past contributes to who you become professionally, and that self-confidence in owning your full story is a key ingredient for career growth in the developer space.
00:07:20 - Building Reactadelphia and the Power of Reaching Out
Dom describes launching RQ React, a small monthly meetup where he taught React to about ten people, and how that evolved into Reactadelphia, a community effort that helped close to 50 developers find jobs in and around Philadelphia. He explains how teaching others fundamentally improved his own understanding and forced him to think beyond his personal learning style.
The conversation turns to the importance of reaching out to well-known developers. Dom shares stories of messaging Kent Dodds for testing advice and connecting with Andrew Mead and Tyler McGinnis, all of whom responded generously. He contrasts these authentic interactions with what he sees as a growing culture of grift in DevRel, where some influencers funnel newcomers toward paid courses rather than offering genuine help, and stresses that follower counts are meaningless compared to real relationships.
00:14:05 - Discord vs. Slack and Community Platform Strategy
Dom makes his case for why developer communities should move from Slack to Discord, citing Slack's ability for admins to read private DMs and its weaker moderation tools as serious drawbacks. He acknowledges that Discord's onboarding experience still needs work but highlights features like the forums UI, events, and stages as underutilized strengths that can transform community engagement.
The discussion covers practical challenges like SEO discoverability for Discord content, which Dom is solving by scraping forum messages via Discord's API into Zeta's Elastic-powered search. He also touches on traditional forums like Discourse, the limitations of Discord's Inbox UI, and how the shift to an opt-in channel model changes the community experience compared to Slack's default structure where users must manually discover channels.
00:19:42 - Providing Real Community Value Without Extracting
Scott and Dom explore the tension between building community for users versus building it for the company. Dom argues that most companies want to extract value from communities far too quickly and that meaningful results take six months to a year to materialize. He emphasizes that engagement quality matters far more than member count, preferring 500 active members over 100,000 silent ones.
Dom shares how at Cloudinary, he and colleague Tessa invested in ambassadors by buying them streaming equipment rather than just sending swag boxes, creating a flywheel where empowered creators attracted more community members. Scott draws parallels to ClickFunnels' ambassador and customer spotlight programs, which built a significant portion of the company through genuine community-led growth rather than just claiming the label.
00:29:46 - The Real Role of DevRel and Burnout
Dom challenges the common view of DevRel as a content machine, arguing that DX professionals should function as "customer zero" who stress-test onboarding, identify product gaps, and relay feedback to engineering in constructive ways. He explains his decision at Zeta to place DX under product rather than marketing, allowing for deeper engineering collaboration while the company is still small enough to shape its culture.
The conversation addresses DevRel burnout head-on. Dom describes how a single DevRel ticket often spawns five sub-tasks across multiple teams, most of which get denied, creating an exhausting cycle of context switching and political navigation. He and Anthony discuss why people with ADHD often thrive in these roles, why many DevRels eventually retreat to engineering for its singular focus, and why DevRel organizations desperately need dedicated technical project managers to handle the planning and tracking burden that currently falls on individual contributors.
00:46:17 - Closing Advice and Where to Find Dom
Dom wraps up with direct advice for companies and community builders: be upfront about expectations when hiring for DevRel, focus on providing genuine value in your communities, and don't shy away from honest feedback. He invites listeners to try Zeta at xata.io and to join their Discord for support and conversation.
The hosts and Dom reflect on how much ground they covered and express mutual interest in continuing the conversation in future episodes. Dom mentions wanting to revive his personal stream and get back to the creative work he enjoyed before focusing heavily on career advancement, closing out with encouragement for anyone to reach out to him directly on any platform under his name, Domitrius Clark.
Transcript
00:00:00 - Scott Steinlage
Yo, yo, yo. Welcome to JavaScript Jam. We're live right here, right now, at Render ATL. Looking over the city. It's dope.
00:00:12 - Domitrius Clark
Beautiful, beautiful view.
00:00:14 - Scott Steinlage
Yes. Sitting here with our boy Dom. Yep, totally.
00:00:21 - Domitrius Clark
All right.
00:00:22 - Scott Steinlage
I am Scott Steinlage, and I am a technical community manager at Edgio and co-host of this here podcast, JavaScript Jam.
00:00:29 - Anthony Campolo
And I am Anthony Campolo, developer advocate at Edgio.
00:00:33 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, and you are.
00:00:35 - Domitrius Clark
The last time I checked. I'm unsure, so this may be something I circle back on later. Domitrius Clark. I do developer experience at Xata.
00:00:42 - Scott Steinlage
Nice.
00:00:43 - Domitrius Clark
Or "Zata," if you say "data" and "data" differently.
00:00:45 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:00:46 - Scott Steinlage
You know, that's kind of interesting.
00:00:47 - Anthony Campolo
That's what it is.
00:00:48 - Domitrius Clark
Every time. Every time someone asks me, I'm like, which one do you use, data or data? And they're like, oh, this. And I'm like, that.
00:00:55 - Anthony Campolo
I've just been wondering what the name meant, period.
00:00:58 - Domitrius Clark
Because it's like, I think for a while they were even branding it as Xata Base.
00:01:02 - Anthony Campolo
Oh.
00:01:03 - Domitrius Clark
And then they dropped the base, probably.
00:01:05 - Anthony Campolo
Okay.
00:01:05 - Scott Steinlage
They dropped the base.
00:01:08 - Anthony Campolo
Right?
00:01:08 - Scott Steinlage
Drop it. Drop the...
00:01:10 - Domitrius Clark
Drop the base. Yeah. We would be terrible DJs. I just want to put that out there.
00:01:14 - Anthony Campolo
But great radio hosts.
00:01:16 - Domitrius Clark
Something like that. Something like that. Yeah.
00:01:19 - Scott Steinlage
Absolutely. Don't put me on some mixers.
00:01:21 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah. I could pick good songs, but that's probably all you get from me. Right.
00:01:27 - Scott Steinlage
Birds flying high. Okay. Oh, yeah.
00:01:30 - Domitrius Clark
Are you a singer or are you a DJ?
00:01:32 - Scott Steinlage
Mixture.
00:01:33 - Domitrius Clark
What aren't you?
00:01:34 - Scott Steinlage
What aren't you?
00:01:35 - Domitrius Clark
I've been really impressed by your range.
00:01:38 - Scott Steinlage
Oh, thank you. Appreciate that.
00:01:39 - Domitrius Clark
Any time.
00:01:40 - Scott Steinlage
All right, so, yeah, I'm so excited to be sitting here today.
00:01:46 - Domitrius Clark
This has been a long time coming.
00:01:48 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah.
00:01:48 - Domitrius Clark
We've talked about it. We've seen each other at so many conferences.
00:01:50 - Anthony Campolo
Talked to you when you've been working at three separate companies, and every...
00:01:54 - Domitrius Clark
Time you're like, when are we going to get a JavaScript Jam on it?
00:01:56 - Scott Steinlage
Let's do something.
00:01:57 - Domitrius Clark
Yep, yep, yep, yep. So I'm happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
00:02:00 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, man. Cool. So, yeah, what are you doing at Render, man?
00:02:06 - Domitrius Clark
So I was actually at the first Render, and I just like... for me, I've been an event runner before. I ran Reactadelphia for a good three years, and we're actually spinning that back up this year, so I'm really excited.
00:02:20 - Anthony Campolo
I mean, that's your claim to fame for a while.
00:02:22 - Domitrius Clark
Well, that's like... I tell people all the time that everybody always asks, what led to people getting to know you? And it was just really being super involved in my local community, like Philly. So I'm from Philadelphia, South Jersey, but you're basically a diet Philadelphia. And when you live in South Jersey, for me, everybody overlooks Philly for New York, right? It's easy. That's where big tech happens on the East Coast. And I just realized there were so many talented folks around me when I was coming up, like, seven years ago. And I really wanted to put their voices into the rest of the development ecosystem because I started to get involved in the broader community, the Twitter community. And I realized just how much Philly really keeps to itself. And to a point, I like that. But it's also like, I want other people to see how talented Philly was. And I also wanted to show people inside of Philly that there was so much opportunity outside of Philly for Philadelphians. So I built Reactadelphia. And for me, that was where I started to decide who I wanted to be in my career.
00:03:21 - Domitrius Clark
A lot of people always try to figure out, in the time that I spend doing the thing that I'm doing, what is my outcome and what do I want it to be? For me it was like, let's get people jobs. I am a career transitioner, bootcamp graduate.
00:03:33 - Anthony Campolo
Were you already at Cloudinary when you started that, or was that beforehand?
00:03:36 - Domitrius Clark
That was before.
00:03:37 - Anthony Campolo
So actually you kind of parlayed that into that job.
00:03:39 - Domitrius Clark
So my... well, my first job ever was at a small three-person company named Red Queen. Worked out of my boss's house in his office. And so for me, I started really in the front-end developer space, and I didn't really have a huge following or any of that. And then at Red Queen, I built a small meetup because we built a React tooling SDK for second-screen applications for video games. So basically we would take game data and, if you're a gamer, there's an application called Overwolf, which is like an overlay on your game. We were second-screen apps. So I did that for a while, and I told them when they first were looking for a senior engineer for their first hire, I DM'd the manager and I was like, hey, look, this will be my first job, but I can come in and I know how to build communities. I'd been building communities my whole life, like gaming communities and stuff like that. So I knew how to gather people around a topic and a subject.
00:04:35 - Anthony Campolo
That's why you're already hip on Discords.
00:04:38 - Domitrius Clark
It is weird how much of the stuff that you do... people all the time, especially when I was first starting out of my bootcamp, were like, take retail off of your resume. It has nothing to do with anything. Retail is 100% why I am where I am right now. It's not because I sat in retail and I sold things. It's because I was a little bit different. I loved building relationships with my customers. I worked at Vans for a few years and people would bring me dinner. My customers would bring in extended family to spend hundreds of dollars because they were like, I love just sitting and talking. Well, because I'm also not gonna let you buy some BS. If your shoes look like crap, I'm gonna tell you, don't buy those. Those don't look good on you. Buy these. This is what you would like. And so I kind of said, for me, it builds you. Everything that you have done builds you, and you can't get rid of it.
00:05:29 - Domitrius Clark
You can't escape it. So use it as a driving force.
00:05:32 - Scott Steinlage
Oh, yeah, dude. No. And that's a great thing, though, that you have the ability to recognize that and see where it does help you. Because a lot of people actually have trouble connecting the dots. Everybody says, okay, try and use your background to show the benefits of how you're going to be a valuable asset in your current or future role here. And a lot of people can't really put their thumb on what that looks like, whereas you're just, like, spitting it out.
00:05:59 - Domitrius Clark
I think it's a lot to do with self-confidence. I would say that I think a lot of the thing that drives me is my ability to... I've never really... Can I curse on this?
00:06:08 - Scott Steinlage
Sure.
00:06:08 - Domitrius Clark
I've never really given a shit what people think about me.
00:06:12 - Anthony Campolo
Some people are ashamed of, like, I did this kind of...
00:06:15 - Domitrius Clark
And it's fair. I don't think everybody should be how I am. Not everybody needs to be this fully confident person to make it in tech. But I do think that there is a time that you have to sit and think about, look at anybody successful in their life. They all didn't start that way. And everybody, like the corny influencers online, right, is always like, well, Oprah didn't get her start until she was in her 40s or something. But that's true. It's corny, and I think the worst things about life are that the corny things are true.
00:06:45 - Anthony Campolo
Right?
00:06:45 - Scott Steinlage
I said that in a podcast, like, a couple podcasts...
00:06:47 - Domitrius Clark
Well, dude, it's like... and it's like, yeah, you did. It's hard for people to fathom that that's real advice. But at the end of the day, I just turned 30 in April, and there's people, right, where it's like, are you a baby still or are you older? What does that look like? And I think to get to here now, it's like, I went through a lot of BS in my life, and I look back at it all and it made 100% of me. It forged me into the man I have become today. But yeah, we were off track.
00:07:19 - Anthony Campolo
The...
00:07:20 - Domitrius Clark
The big thing, I started a meetup at Red Queen called RQ React, and I was just teaching people React. It was like 10 people a month. I wrote a workshop every month for a year.
00:07:29 - Scott Steinlage
That's awesome.
00:07:30 - Domitrius Clark
While I was doing my work. That was an amazing experience. And I learned early that teaching people teaches you.
00:07:37 - Scott Steinlage
Oh, hell yeah.
00:07:37 - Domitrius Clark
Because you start to think outside of your own ideology of how to learn things.
00:07:41 - Scott Steinlage
So it solidifies it too.
00:07:43 - Domitrius Clark
Well, it also makes you... because I learn a very specific way.
00:07:47 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:07:47 - Domitrius Clark
Shout out to Tyler McGinnis. Without Tyler McGinnis, I wouldn't have learned React as fast as I did.
00:07:52 - Anthony Campolo
One of the best React educators.
00:07:53 - Domitrius Clark
Well, dude, it took me... but why? And this is before... I don't know. I think he's a person I would hang out with, and so it's funny. I took time to get unstuck, and who was relatable for me? He was. And I was on... I mean, I was a Udemy fiend. I was buying those $10.99 courses. You couldn't tell me to stop.
00:08:12 - Anthony Campolo
There's a settlement now because Udemy... you know how they used to do that thing where they would have a course like 150 bucks and then randomly they would be like...
00:08:19 - Domitrius Clark
$10, and they wouldn't even tell you as a creator.
00:08:21 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, dude, they got sued. A whole bunch of people are getting paid.
00:08:24 - Domitrius Clark
As they should. Well, so another person who I accredit a lot of my career success to is Andrew Mead, and he is strictly on Udemy. One of the most successful React teachers on Udemy.
00:08:34 - Scott Steinlage
He has some great courses.
00:08:35 - Domitrius Clark
An absolute... shout out to you, Andrew. You're one of my good homies. Absolutely spectacular guy. I reached out to him after I had taken like two of his courses and I was like, yo, dude, just want you to know how much of an impact you've made on me.
00:08:47 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah.
00:08:47 - Domitrius Clark
And he was like, are you in Philly? I was like, yeah. He's like, you want to get a beer? I was like, so badly. Yeah. And so we've been friends ever since.
00:08:55 - Anthony Campolo
And Tyler, actually, he was in Philly at the time when you reached out?
00:08:58 - Domitrius Clark
I saw that he had Philadelphia in his... but again, I was such a noob at the time that I was like, nobody wants to come and meet, right? What the hell? What do I got to teach you? I have no experience yet. But yeah, he reached out to me. It was super cool. Tyler, the same. I'd reached out to him and thanked him. And that was a big thing in the early career for me because of that confidence, dude. I was messaging every...
00:09:19 - Scott Steinlage
I love doing that.
00:09:19 - Domitrius Clark
Kent Dodds.
00:09:20 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:09:21 - Domitrius Clark
Also shout out. Back early in my career, they wanted me to write tests. We didn't have any tests for our front end at Red Queen yet, and I was lost, dude. I had no idea what I was doing. We didn't have an education budget. We were a super, super small startup. And so I reached out to Kent and I was like, hey man, you're...
00:09:38 - Anthony Campolo
[unclear]
00:09:39 - Domitrius Clark
Well, dude, I was like, you're probably never going to see this, but if there's any advice that you could give me to get started, I just really don't even know where to start. This man sent me a full-on book response, as you would believe Kent would do, and hit me with, do this, this, this, and this. And when you're done, come back to me and I'll give you the next steps, and we'll keep going back and forth with each other. So, side note: never be afraid to reach out to these high-follower developers that everybody looks at and is like, oh my God, they're never going to talk to me. They're regular people.
00:10:20 - Anthony Campolo
They started at zero followers.
00:10:21 - Domitrius Clark
They started... and your following count means absolutely nothing.
00:10:26 - Scott Steinlage
And here's the thing. Treat them like real people.
00:10:28 - Domitrius Clark
Treat them like real people, man, especially when you see them in person. Like, don't. It feels weird for some... you know what? I'm going to get spicy here. This is why I think a lot of people have disrespect for developer advocates today. It's because I think that there is a level of grift that has arrived to build the followings that have come to fruition now. And because of that, they want to be treated like royalty. And so they make you treat them that way. And so then you go and you meet the kind of OGs of the space who built their following just because of consistent movement, and then you think that they want you to treat them that way, and they're like, please do not. Yeah, I am a regular dude.
00:11:11 - Anthony Campolo
When you first show up into the space, you'll see this whole swath of people, and it'll be hard to know who are the grifters and who aren't.
00:11:17 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah, yeah.
00:11:18 - Anthony Campolo
Once you're in a couple years, then you kind of get a sense. You actually meet these people.
00:11:22 - Domitrius Clark
No, but I mean, when you first start — if I were just starting, yeah, I wouldn't give a single shit whether you're a grifter or not. If you gave me any of your time, I'm in. And I so understand.
00:11:32 - Anthony Campolo
That's why, if they give you their time, I think they wouldn't be a grifter then, like by default maybe.
00:11:36 - Domitrius Clark
But I don't know. It's like sometimes they give you their time and then they'll be like, well, you know, you could buy my course on this.
00:11:45 - Anthony Campolo
It's always that little pitch.
00:11:47 - Domitrius Clark
It's always like a funnel, right, for them. So they'll respond, but then three messages in get you to the funnel. Yeah. I don't know. And no shade to how you build...
00:11:57 - Anthony Campolo
Your career, but sure.
00:12:00 - Domitrius Clark
Don't put that into a position where everybody thinks that that is the only way to grow. I mean, not to toot my own horn, I think a ton of people in the space at least know who I am or what I do. And go look at my Twitter. I have like 3,000 followers. I don't bump up my numbers. I don't ever care to. You'll never see me doing...
00:12:19 - Anthony Campolo
Check the thread below to see...
00:12:22 - Domitrius Clark
Check the thread below to see how Domitrius made it to stardom. You're never gonna see that. And it's not because I don't want to grow. I want to grow, but I want to grow with relationships.
00:12:31 - Scott Steinlage
Yes. And I mean, I think sharing that authentically and just being you...
00:12:36 - Domitrius Clark
Sure.
00:12:36 - Scott Steinlage
In a thread is...
00:12:37 - Domitrius Clark
Is...
00:12:38 - Scott Steinlage
Would be dope.
00:12:38 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah. Is a part of it, right?
00:12:40 - Scott Steinlage
Sure. Why not? I don't know.
00:12:41 - Anthony Campolo
It looks like the Reactadelphia one, even that. That's got like 300 followers. So it's like you probably weren't even trying necessarily to optimize for that. You're like, I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna find the people on the streets.
00:12:51 - Domitrius Clark
Well, so Reactadelphia was interesting because I went from RQ React to Reactadelphia, which actually got me my second job at Guru. So I was at Guru for like six to eight months.
00:13:09 - Scott Steinlage
G-U-R-U.
00:13:09 - Anthony Campolo
Okay. So where Homer works.
00:13:10 - Domitrius Clark
Guru. Yeah. It's in Philly. It's almost like if you were to take Notion and just make it specifically like a database for your company that has no external way to... It's strictly for onboarding and things of that nature.
00:13:23 - Scott Steinlage
Got it.
00:13:24 - Domitrius Clark
But when I was there, they had offered up their venue, and so we grew a ton. And they had an AV setup. So when I found out they had an AV setup, this is pre-pandemic, and I was like, I'm a huge gamer, super nerd. I'm on Twitch, Discord, all of that stuff. To what you said earlier about the Discord stuff, I was like, I could probably get... Everybody always wonders about monetary logistics when you run a meetup. How do I get people? How do I get money from sponsors to get them to fly people in? That's not realistic for a meetup like a conference. The money is there for a conference, much more realistic. For a meetup, nobody wants to give you more than food and a venue. If they have tacos, maybe some tacos. I was a big pizza and LaCroix guy.
00:14:04 - Anthony Campolo
Okay.
00:14:04 - Domitrius Clark
So when I started Reactadelphia, I was like, okay, I bet you I could get people to call in and give talks. And if I get people to call in, we'll do one, one, one. We'll do Philly, remote, Philly. And so I'll bring these big names. This is actually one of the first times I reached out to Jason...
00:14:19 - Anthony Campolo
It's really smart.
00:14:20 - Domitrius Clark
One of the first times I reached out to Jason Langstorff. Now he's like an older brother to me, like a mentor. He'll never admit that he is, but he is. He was one of the first I reached out to, and I was like, people will show up to see Jason and see all of these Philly talents at the same time. And I think by the end of Reactadelphia, we had gotten close to 40 or 50 people jobs, either in the city or outside of the city. And to me, that's not a huge number, but that's huge.
00:14:47 - Scott Steinlage
That's a great thing.
00:14:48 - Domitrius Clark
That is what I wanted. And that's why I'm trying to revive Reactadelphia because, now that I'm established as far as I need to be, how do I find... I had to take a break because I got to a point where I really wanted to grow my career and I didn't know how to juggle everything. And so now I think that I have...
00:15:05 - Anthony Campolo
Pandemic happened too.
00:15:06 - Domitrius Clark
The pandemic happened. Well, the pandemic actually boosted a lot of what I did into why I started to become so busy.
00:15:14 - Anthony Campolo
Right. Well, because you were smart enough to have already gotten the remote angle in there. Under the pandemic, people who were already in a position to go remote whenever had to go remote were...
00:15:27 - Domitrius Clark
Light-years ahead of everyone else. And then everyone else was frantic. Yeah, exactly. So everyone's coming to me like, oh, we heard about Reactadelphia, we've seen the Discord. Could you do that for us? So I did. Kirk Campbell got me in on GraphQL Summit. That was my first remote conference that I had helped with. So I built the Discord for that, and they actually ended up moving their DX team to the Discord, which was pretty cool. And then I had done a couple of contracts here and there with a couple of companies. I did Orbit. I moved their B2B Slack over to a Discord. I made a tweet recently, and if you are still running your community on Slack, you are doing your community a disservice. And I know what you're gonna say. I've heard all of your arguments already. I understand you're comfortable where you are, but it's not about you. And you may say, oh, my community won't move over. They are used to Slack.
00:16:19 - Scott Steinlage
Would you include support in that? Community support?
00:16:26 - Domitrius Clark
I think that really is up to... so when I was at Netlify, Netlify support was definitely not excited to do more asynchronous, non-forum support inside of a live channel like a Discord. And I actually totally respect that because I think that people in this industry are so entitled that there's a difference between wanting to get help and asking for it and waiting for it, and demanding help, and then publicly talking shit on X company or X person for taking a day to answer you.
00:17:03 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:17:03 - Domitrius Clark
And so like...
00:17:04 - Scott Steinlage
That happens.
00:17:06 - Anthony Campolo
And I don't think community should be necessarily support. You can do support in community, but if a community is only support, then you're support. You're not really a community.
00:17:15 - Domitrius Clark
Right. Well, it's funny, though. I think I have probably a hot take on this, which is that nobody wakes up in the morning, grabs their fresh cup of joe, and is like, damn, I can't wait to talk about my day inside of your company Discord. Like, nobody. I don't care. Can you get to a point where technical conversations are happening that are surrounding your product? Sure. Can you build engagement that has nothing to do with your product? Kind of. But really, most of your time, once you open up a company Discord, is going to be spent doing pseudo-support.
00:17:51 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah.
00:17:51 - Domitrius Clark
Even as a DevRel. You're going to be answering questions. When I got to Xata, I slimmed down the channels. I made it to like two or three extra fluff channels of, if you want to have conversation, this is where we can have it. But I focused in. I changed over to the forums UI, which, if you're not there yet, I think is a super good move.
00:18:10 - Anthony Campolo
The move to the forums UI does kind of change things because that allows the two to exist, kind of living next to each other.
00:18:17 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah, yeah. It becomes like a split space for that type of thing. And I think, you know, I'm working on it right now, and I did it at Netlify for the Jamstack community. I love... the API is terrible, but I love that I can use the API to scrape the forums so that a lot of the pushback that I get from teams is like, well, there's no SEO discoverability for answers to questions, and...
00:18:43 - Anthony Campolo
Now there's ways around that.
00:18:43 - Domitrius Clark
Now there's ways around that. You can literally scrape every forum to a site, set up your keywords, and you're off to the races.
00:18:49 - Anthony Campolo
What do you think, though, about people who... technically Discord is a public space, but some people don't necessarily go to it thinking that. Do you feel like you need to alert people to let them know you'll be scraping?
00:19:00 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah, I think that should be right up front. But this is the sad part of ignorance to platforms. Once you've joined a space like that... this is why when people argue with me about Slack, I'm like, dude, good luck trying to fight me on this. You own everything when you join a Slack. You can see everything.
00:19:19 - Anthony Campolo
People's DMs. That alone is...
00:19:21 - Domitrius Clark
You're so weird for wanting that. And you may not use that. I'm not going to say everybody that uses Slack is like this weird overlord searching over your shoulder.
00:19:29 - Anthony Campolo
But it's always there.
00:19:30 - Domitrius Clark
But it's there, dude. And the moderation isn't as granular, and I think that's important. Again, this is the difference between, are you doing this for your community or are you doing this for yourself?
00:19:42 - Scott Steinlage
Oh, dude, that is so deep because I continue to say that even in my job, whatever, I'm like, look, it can't... if you're really wanting to focus on community, period...
00:19:52 - Anthony Campolo
Right.
00:19:52 - Scott Steinlage
It's not about you. You almost should leave...
00:19:54 - Domitrius Clark
Your company out of it.
00:19:55 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah. It's not about me, me, me. It's about we, we, we.
00:19:59 - Domitrius Clark
Right. And providing value. So many places that I worked, so many places that I've contracted with, or just giving advice to... you don't always have to pay me. I'm happy to shout my opinions at you wherever.
00:20:11 - Scott Steinlage
Right.
00:20:11 - Domitrius Clark
But the big problem that a lot of companies have when they want to set up these communities, wherever it is, whether it's Slack or forums or whatever, they want to extract way more immediately than is necessary. And dude, it is going to take you... I try to explain this to leadership at a lot of places...
00:20:30 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah.
00:20:31 - Domitrius Clark
I could have 7,000 people in my Discord, and if only three people are engaged, it doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't. People always ask for month-over-month growth of a Discord, and I think that's a fine line of fluff data. Like, oh yeah, if I went from a thousand to two thousand, at least people are knowing about the product. That's a cool point, right? But that, A, doesn't mean they're a customer. B, they probably joined and never came back.
00:20:59 - Anthony Campolo
You know, it's just one of like 50 Discords on their sidebar, which is a big gripe.
00:21:04 - Domitrius Clark
Oh my God, I have such a gripe with Discord. The Inbox UI on Discord could change Discord if they made it a mainstay feature of the platform. It's up in the top-right corner. It's a little Inbox icon, and it only stays a popover. You can't full-screen it. There's not even a way in the API to access it. I've tried to find what that looks like. But if you could have that... what it allows you to do, for people who don't know, and maybe this will help you slim down your Discords a bit, is you can mute full servers, but that actually has a negative impact because you won't know, unless you go to the server, that things are happening.
00:21:46 - Anthony Campolo
Guarantee you're just gonna forget this.
00:21:47 - Domitrius Clark
You'll forget the server. I do it all the time. I'm on Discord habitually and I still can't keep up with the many servers that I'd love to. But if you go into individual channels, you can mute categories, but you can also mute channels. And when you mute channels, you can hide channels, which actually just came out with a new onboarding flow that lets you opt in or opt out. Everything was always opt in before, and that was one of the big...
00:22:08 - Anthony Campolo
Differences between Slack and Discord. I kind of like that people would always be in all the channels and then have to opt out of channels, because then they at least start by seeing everything. Whereas Slack, you usually join and if you don't go into the channel list and scroll 500 channels, onboarding is bad on...
00:22:23 - Domitrius Clark
Both platforms, I think. I think Discord is trying to figure it out, but I think it's going to still take them a little bit of trial and error. It is true. They're coming from a... I've used TeamSpeak. I've used all of these previous platforms that gamers would use to communicate while they were gaming. I've used all of these, and now that's... that was Discord. And so that's why it was already kind of community-focused. But everyone's like, well, it's a joke platform. It's for gamers. It's not for professionals. I'm like, should you be adopting Discord at work for your channel communication? No. Should you be using it for every external communication you have? Yeah, most likely.
00:22:56 - Anthony Campolo
So what are your thoughts on old-school forums? Is there still a place for that?
00:23:00 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah. Again, this goes back to what your support team is comfortable with. Forums like Discourse are still very usable platforms.
00:23:09 - Anthony Campolo
I like Discourse because then, also going back to the SEO...
00:23:13 - Domitrius Clark
It's built in. People will Google things.
00:23:15 - Anthony Campolo
You Google like Redwood Railway, you'll find a Discourse thing. I've written about it, you know, like top on Google.
00:23:21 - Domitrius Clark
And I think there is... I'm excited to see... I'm going to release the thing that I put together for Reactadelphia and for Xata open source. Basically what I want to do is... the APIs for Discord are really annoying where you have to unravel each forum message. So you have to unravel all of the forum messages and then do an API call for each message, so it hits rate limits really quickly. So basically what I'm gonna do is a daily cron that scrapes it into Xata, and then now I have an actual individualized place that I have to call from that I control. And what that also gives you power to do is, for events, when you do an event in Discord... I think that's one of actually the coolest things. Events and stages in Discord, which are underutilized right now, definitely one of the cool things is that you have them, but once an event happens, it's gone. There's no history of your event anymore. And also, attendee count doesn't really mean anything. Interested is a feature of an event, but you have no idea if interested showed up.
00:24:18 - Domitrius Clark
You have no idea what that looks like or who ended up...
00:24:21 - Anthony Campolo
Some of the events, they are like a Discord event. Some of them it's just like, go to the Twitch thing.
00:24:27 - Domitrius Clark
Which I like. I like that they allow for external platform events. But now what you'll do is, I'll scrape those forum messages. I will also scrape all of my events and now, again, have past events, past attendees who showed up. Now this also gives my support team... So Xata is built on top of Elastic. So we have really good fuzzy search capabilities built in, keyword search, semantic search, all built into the platform.
00:24:50 - Anthony Campolo
For some reason, I had been thinking Xata was like Postgres or something.
00:24:54 - Domitrius Clark
So we are built on Postgres, but we also use Kafka, and then it sends out to our Elastic. A lot of our team actually comes from Elastic, so they have pretty deep knowledge on how important search is and what that looks like. So when it's built right into your database... I mean, how many people reach for Algolia, right? You end up having to...
00:25:15 - Anthony Campolo
That's huge. Because, you know, there's so many Postgres providers out there these days. Something like that, that's something you should really harp on.
00:25:20 - Domitrius Clark
And I think we actually do a pretty good job of, if you go to the website, that's a pretty mainstay feature that we talk about. But without shilling any more of the product, I think for me it's not...
00:25:30 - Anthony Campolo
Man, chill. I want to learn more about Xata.
00:25:32 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah, it's really cool. You know, what's funny? I'm not a big DB expert, so coming here, I actually got to be customer zero, which was really dope. And I think that every developer experience engineer out there, DX or DevRel or whatever the hell you call yourself, be customer zero. First, great way to add value. You're gonna find so many holes. And everybody... we can get into what DevRel is to me. But one of the biggest things that I think is underutilized for DevRel, and this is from a leadership perspective too, is I think everybody looks at a DevRel like they're just public shills that have to talk about the product in public. You do much better as a pseudo bug finder. When I join a company, my biggest goal when I first start, and I'm only four months into Xata right now, is to find what sucks. Like, what are the worst pieces? And start to work with engineering and give them that feedback, and find a way to, A, let them know in a way that isn't disrespectful.
00:26:34 - Domitrius Clark
Because you can't just come and be like, hey, this sucks. Fix it. You have to come with...
00:26:38 - Anthony Campolo
Every new user shows up and says all your good work...
00:26:42 - Domitrius Clark
Exactly, exactly. And things happen in a way that aren't really moldable after a certain amount of time.
00:26:47 - Anthony Campolo
So, like, you lack context, which is both good and bad.
00:26:50 - Domitrius Clark
Sure.
00:26:50 - Anthony Campolo
Because you can say, okay, I don't have any context, and so this is hard to do, and they need to know that. But at the same time there may be a reason why they already knew that and had to make X, Y decision.
00:27:00 - Domitrius Clark
When you build a product for so long, you are no longer a user of the product, and that disconnects you totally from... even if you dogfood it.
00:27:10 - Anthony Campolo
Right.
00:27:11 - Domitrius Clark
Even if as an engineering team you find ways to dogfood your product, you are still an advanced user.
00:27:17 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah.
00:27:18 - Domitrius Clark
You are no longer...
00:27:20 - Scott Steinlage
You don't remember what it was like...
00:27:21 - Domitrius Clark
Seeing what onboarding looks like. You understand exactly what to do, where to do it, and how. And that's where DX value comes in for me, especially someone who comes in contextless. They have such a great view of the onboarding ramp. And that's why certain teams should, in my opinion, report to DX or at least be really adjacent and connected, because it allows you to kind of deploy that value in a way that your team probably hasn't.
00:27:49 - Anthony Campolo
What is DX under in Xata?
00:27:51 - Domitrius Clark
So this was my decision when I came in. It was its own vertical, and I think that that is how it should be at every place.
00:28:01 - Anthony Campolo
And that's how it still is.
00:28:02 - Domitrius Clark
So I decided I wanted to make sure that there was a really deep connection between our team and engineering. I have worked at places that that is not the case. I've worked at places where it is the case, and it's still hard. I chose to be under product. So we're a fully engineering-staffed company. We don't have marketing yet. We don't have growth or anything like that. So we're really engineering-led, and that's a good thing because that means you get really great features really fast. But it also puts you into a position where you don't really understand what it looks like when it lands right or how to circle back to it. Alex, who is the head of product at Xata, is one of my favorites. I really enjoy working with him, and he doesn't treat me like... he's my boss, but he is my boss... he treats me like I'm his equal. He comes to me as such. We brainstorm all the time, and it makes it so we have a deeper connection toward product engineers. We now are building a relationship that when we eventually do end up breaking off... my goal is to get VP eventually and run my own vertical again.
00:29:07 - Domitrius Clark
But it allows you the time, while we're small, to really affect the culture. And that is the biggest problem I've seen at every company that I haven't worked at too, is that culture demands very specific things from DX, or DevRel, which a lot of places still call it. And usually that's content machines. Sure, are we the best suited to make content? 100%. Should there be times where we focus specifically on providing content? Yeah. Is it all our function should be? No. You're underutilizing your team. If you're hearing this and you're feeling some type of way, look in the mirror. It's probably you.
00:29:46 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I think DevRel, or developer experience to me, should be as cross-functional as possible. And this whole question of what you are under is really hard because you are gonna be part marketing, part product, part engineering.
00:30:01 - Domitrius Clark
It's like you can't really touch more teams than anyone else. You touch more teams than anyone else.
00:30:06 - Anthony Campolo
And that's also why you end up being a great customer-zero user and you end up being a great advocate, because you can see the big picture.
00:30:12 - Domitrius Clark
It's why you burn out too.
00:30:14 - Anthony Campolo
Yes.
00:30:14 - Domitrius Clark
Nobody understands everything in other verticals, why that happens so fast, and why the DevRel superstars end up going to run their own things eventually. Because, A, you spend a lot of time being told no for ideas. You spend a lot of time caring about something more than a lot of other people do because you're so cross-functional. And you spend a lot of time juggling. I tell everybody that the hardest part of being in DevRel is that you don't take a ticket, complete it, and move on. You take a ticket and turn it into five tickets and then juggle those tickets and explain the value of those tickets and then get denied for three of the five of those tickets. And then you have to take those two that did get approved and put all of your love and your attention into it. So I think it's just really easy to burn out because it has so much context switching, and no other team as actively works so cross-functionally as a DevRel team does, in my opinion.
00:31:10 - Anthony Campolo
That's why people with ADHD do so well in it, I think.
00:31:13 - Domitrius Clark
Welcome to my life.
00:31:15 - Anthony Campolo
I know so many DevRels with ADHD. Yeah, it's a very common thing, it seems like. I think that the context switching is part of why that seems to be...
00:31:22 - Domitrius Clark
A type of place.
00:31:24 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, exactly.
00:31:25 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah, definitely. Totally.
00:31:28 - Anthony Campolo
So I'd be curious to dig in on one of the things you said. We always talk about adding value. And with the community specifically, not necessarily DevRel, but when you have a community, when you have a Discord, when you have this space, you talked a little about support, how that could be adding value. What other ways does a community... how do you actually add value to your community without extracting value?
00:31:48 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah. So I think this really comes down to what your product is. You really have to think about, if you're... I'll speak from experience, right? We're a database provider. And so for us, we fit into most stacks and we fit into most frameworks. So that gives us a really unique position to be able to start doing education around those things, and it's still impacting users for our platform. So me right now, shout out to Attila. He's one of our senior DXers. He's been doing a ton of content just around Next server actions and what that's going to look like with databases, and teaching about React server components. And a lot of companies would be like, that's not bringing me immediate value, so why aren't you putting out videos strictly on our database? And we're still in there. Right when he does a server action, he does his Xata call, and you can see what it looks like. But he is also teaching people the value of this new architecture that Next is coming out with. And so I think that is a way to add value, is to still focus deeply on education.
00:32:51 - Domitrius Clark
And it isn't going to convert all the time. Things I do, it's not going to be the thing that suddenly brings you 100 enterprise users, right?
00:32:59 - Anthony Campolo
Like, that's hard to measure the impact.
00:33:01 - Domitrius Clark
I mean, I think that's another big problem for DevRel is that, because we're so cross-functional, we hit goals for other teams. But you can't track what that looks like because you're like the alley-oop. You're the assist. So I can be like, oh, I assisted in doing this, but what did that translate to? I'm unsure because I was only one-fifth of the process. Right? And so trying to extract monetary value as a DevRel is why you see DevRels get cut often. Because they look back and they go, well, marketing made me this, sales made me this, engineering made me this. Yeah, what did DevRel do for that? DevRel made me content.
00:33:42 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:33:43 - Domitrius Clark
And it's like, no, that's unfair. And that's why, every... we're talking about community, dude. You're never gonna get a month and be excited about what happened. You're gonna get six months, you're gonna get a year, and then you're gonna look back and go, oh wow, we built a lot of things in a year. But it takes that year to see any of that impact come full circle. So value education. Value events in your ecosystem. It doesn't all have to be about you. And we talked about this a while ago with the Jamstack. We used to talk Jamstack all the time.
00:34:16 - Anthony Campolo
I was so hyped because I was someone who was actually asking for a Jamstack Discord before you showed up.
00:34:20 - Domitrius Clark
Yep, yep. And so when I got there, it was like... to me, and they may not hold the same value still for it, but I was like, people know that the Jamstack is Netlify, right? Like, it's a known fact that they are synonymous in the way that they are marketed. And to that, there are also a ton of companies who rely on that term for their own marketing. And so what I tried to do, and I think actually worked out really well, was let me go to all of these other companies and boost whatever events they're having and just put their events in my Discord. Let them come and teach people stuff that has nothing to do specifically with Netlify sometimes. Most of the time they would, because they would deploy it to Netlify, so it all kind of worked out in the end. But the rising tide, when you're in an ecosystem...
00:35:12 - Anthony Campolo
Really good at that.
00:35:19 - Domitrius Clark
And Jason was really good at that. When he was working there and he would have people come on, he would kind of work Netlify a little bit into his Learn With Jason, but it would just be like a tiny...
00:35:30 - Anthony Campolo
This is great. Why wouldn't ya?
00:35:31 - Domitrius Clark
And it was never forced, and it was something... it always felt natural because he would use it without working there. He still does. He's not at Netlify anymore as a full-time employee. He still uses Netlify for his sites. It's like you look at Kent Dodds with the Remix stuff, and that was a huge thing, right? Do you only like Remix because you work there? No. I watched him love Remix before joining Remix, and now he's gone and he's still involved. And so I don't know. I think it's just really easy to look at a bubble online and just believe whatever you hear.
00:35:50 - Anthony Campolo
But easy to be cynical.
00:35:52 - Domitrius Clark
It's easy to be cynical. And it's also like, so many companies do things that try to extract value from you. So it's like you do have to be a little bit apprehensive and put...
00:36:01 - Anthony Campolo
[unclear]
00:36:04 - Domitrius Clark
And then most of them aren't, dude. And, like, do you take VC money? Are you ethical anymore? Who knows? You know what I mean? Because you get to a point where, no matter how ethical you are, you need to make them their money back. And to do that you have to do things that I wouldn't say are unethical...
00:36:19 - Scott Steinlage
No.
00:36:20 - Domitrius Clark
But you have to do things that...
00:36:21 - Anthony Campolo
Optimize for a certain goal, for extracting value.
00:36:24 - Domitrius Clark
You have to find a way to finally... it doesn't matter how much value I can put in at a company, I at some point have to extract some value back. So rising tide of your ecosystem I think is another really good way to provide value not only to your community, but to the companies that you'd be adjacent with. And then I think some of the companies that I think have done the best for community have figured out really good ways in which their community like to interact. And that usually is a thread about how they're doing or a thread about the technologies they're using. Engaging them daily in ways that they can engage back with you, and not making them feel like they have to be the first engager, really helps kind of build that engagement trust. Growth doesn't matter. Engagement does, to me. I'd rather have 500 members with 400 members talking than 100,000 members with 10 members talking, 20 members.
00:37:12 - Scott Steinlage
Absolutely.
00:37:13 - Domitrius Clark
So I think I like to optimize community strategy around that. That's why I like using Orbit to track engagement because they do this really good idea of cross-platform identity, where from your YouTube to your GitHub to your LinkedIn to your Discord, you're one person.
00:37:32 - Anthony Campolo
You want the god mode.
00:37:33 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah, well, I just get to see, like, oh, this person is across five of our platforms and helping people. We need to be providing them value because they are doing this for free. And that's what I think a lot of the time happens. You build these ambassador programs and you don't really do that much for them. You send them a swag box and you're off to the races. But that's just more stuff for you to extract value. So I think, when I was at Cloudinary, Tessa and I would discuss... she's awesome. Yeah. And she's amazing. I love her to death. We would discuss, like, it's really hard to get swag for people that actually provides value. So when it was during the pandemic and the Cloudinary ambassadors, we would reach out to them and be like, what streaming equipment do you need? How do we get it so that you can create content? And yeah, would we love if you created content for Cloudinary?
00:38:22 - Domitrius Clark
For sure.
00:38:22 - Anthony Campolo
Right.
00:38:23 - Domitrius Clark
If you don't, that's fine. But you're in the program for that reason. You want to. And you would see the look on their faces, especially when you would be working with people who just don't have the means. And so, like, oh yeah, we'll buy you this Yeti mic. That's a hundred dollars to us who are sitting here with nicer mics and know what good production looks like.
00:38:43 - Scott Steinlage
What happened with Redwood?
00:38:45 - Anthony Campolo
What do you mean? Tom bought me a camera. Yeah, Tom bought me like a $2,000 camera because he was watching me on JavaScript Jam. Back in the day he was like, bro, you need some better production value. Let me send you a $2,000 camera.
00:39:00 - Domitrius Clark
And it's like, that obviously is a large purchase.
00:39:04 - Scott Steinlage
That's kind of crazy.
00:39:04 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah. He's a billionaire.
00:39:06 - Domitrius Clark
Sure, sure. But these companies... you offer them this tiny setup and it changes things for them.
00:39:16 - Scott Steinlage
Oh, heck yeah.
00:39:17 - Domitrius Clark
And so that gets you hyped up.
00:39:19 - Anthony Campolo
Like, make that content. You feel better about the content you're creating.
00:39:22 - Domitrius Clark
And then people are like, where'd you get that?
00:39:23 - Anthony Campolo
See? Rising tide lifts all boats.
00:39:25 - Domitrius Clark
All boats, man. And then they're like, where'd you get this stuff? And you're like, dude, I was a part of the Cloudinary Ambassador program. And then they want to join.
00:39:31 - Scott Steinlage
There you go.
00:39:31 - Domitrius Clark
And so, yeah, I don't know. Every company can't do it. I get it. And not every company is there yet.
00:39:37 - Anthony Campolo
But flywheel. It's like, how do...
00:39:40 - Domitrius Clark
You get the fly...
00:39:40 - Anthony Campolo
That's where the VCs come in.
00:39:41 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah.
00:39:42 - Scott Steinlage
That's one thing I really loved about... You know, I always bring this company up so much, but they did such an amazing job.
00:39:47 - Domitrius Clark
ClickFunnels.
00:39:48 - Scott Steinlage
Yes, ClickFunnels. Like, seriously, I'm not even kidding, dude. I can bring this up in every conversation. It doesn't matter. It always, always pertains to the conversation. So they do an amazing job at their ambassadors. Okay? They're affiliates, though.
00:40:02 - Anthony Campolo
Right.
00:40:03 - Scott Steinlage
And they have a process, even actually their customers, of giving them spotlight.
00:40:10 - Domitrius Clark
Right. And they do it with... I love that. With their customer spotlight. Oh, hell yeah. Spotlights are another huge way to provide value back.
00:40:16 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah. Funnel Hacking Live is this huge event they do every year, and it's like 5,000 people now, every time.
00:40:21 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah, yeah.
00:40:22 - Scott Steinlage
And they sell it out every single time.
00:40:24 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah.
00:40:24 - Anthony Campolo
Right.
00:40:25 - Scott Steinlage
And they have some amazing speakers and stuff, whatever. But they also freaking highlight the people that are using their software. And the only thing they're making money off of, by the way, they're not making money off of how much you make. They're just making money off you paying them $197 or $297 a month, right? And that's it. And so the beautiful thing is they're celebrating how much you're making, though. Like, if you hit a million dollars in your funnel, you get a Two Comma Club Award.
00:40:50 - Anthony Campolo
Right.
00:40:51 - Scott Steinlage
And you get it on stage at Funnel Hacking Live.
00:40:53 - Domitrius Clark
That's it.
00:40:53 - Anthony Campolo
Right.
00:40:53 - Scott Steinlage
And they freaking have like...
00:40:55 - Domitrius Clark
20 of these a week celebrating your community. Yeah, this was a big...
00:41:00 - Scott Steinlage
And they give out free swag. They don't make you pay for it. And also the swag is phenomenal.
00:41:05 - Domitrius Clark
That is another big...
00:41:07 - Scott Steinlage
You have to have something that you want to wear.
00:41:09 - Domitrius Clark
I understand that all companies can't be spending hundreds of thousands on swag, but don't buy shirts if they're gonna be crap.
00:41:15 - Scott Steinlage
Like, it goes a long way.
00:41:17 - Domitrius Clark
We get shirts all the time.
00:41:21 - Scott Steinlage
That's a whole nother rabbit hole. But either way, I'm just saying they do a great job at spotlighting the customer. And then as far as their affiliates, right, they do a really amazing job with that too. They have... it's kind of like direct marketing or network marketing companies, how they're like, oh, if you hit this level or you do these amounts of things, then you get a free car or whatever.
00:41:45 - Anthony Campolo
Right.
00:41:46 - Scott Steinlage
Well, ClickFunnels has a program like that where they'll pay for your car if you hit so many people that you're bringing in or whatever. But it's not just about that. It's also just highlighting them from other different angles too. It doesn't have to be that big, right?
00:42:00 - Domitrius Clark
No, I think you're totally right. They did a really great job of that. Creative ways.
00:42:05 - Scott Steinlage
It built 60, 70% of their company.
00:42:07 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah. Creative ways. Well, see, this is where... a lot of companies are always like, we're community-led growth. Yeah, no, you're not. Yeah, no, you're not.
00:42:18 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah.
00:42:18 - Anthony Campolo
It's a really hard thing to actually be.
00:42:20 - Domitrius Clark
Well, dude, it's just 'cause...
00:42:22 - Scott Steinlage
ClickFunnels crushed it.
00:42:23 - Domitrius Clark
You don't...
00:42:25 - Scott Steinlage
They did PLG too, though.
00:42:26 - Domitrius Clark
You don't do enough for customers that don't pay. Yeah. And that's where I know if you're community-led growth or not. What you treat non-paying customers like is how I judge you. Do you want them to become paying customers? Yes. But how do you support them to get there? How do you... they come in with an idea, right? What does that look like?
00:42:48 - Scott Steinlage
That's a big difference between say like SaaS and then the SaaS developer world.
00:42:53 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah.
00:42:53 - Scott Steinlage
So like SaaS-focused developer world versus SaaS direct-consumer world or B2B, whatever, non-developer world, is the fact that there are usually no free tiers, for the most part, for that stuff. Right? Like ClickFunnels, there's no free tier. It's like 14-day free trial, 30-day free trial.
00:43:11 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah, we have huge free... I think that's also one of the cool things about...
00:43:16 - Scott Steinlage
That's more PLG-focused though, right?
00:43:17 - Domitrius Clark
That's more PLG, exactly. And so I think this is just like every company now that sees successful developer communities suddenly is like, let's hire a community person. Let's get them in, and then we're gonna grow this massive community overnight. Yeah, no you're not.
00:43:32 - Scott Steinlage
Right.
00:43:33 - Domitrius Clark
A, you're gonna hire a community person. You're gonna want more from them. You're gonna make them juggle the burnout. You're gonna make them juggle, and you're gonna want to see them do this, that, and the third. And you're not gonna tell them that up front. You're gonna say, oh no, just do the community. I've seen it time and time again. I've seen them burn out time and time again, and I've seen them leave and go and do anything else. You know how many DevRels I talk to now that are ready to go back to engineering? Because it is singular focus. It is, I get the thing, I do the thing, I move on to the next thing. And yeah, I've been fighting an idea with a lot of different places. I think one of the things missing from a DevRel organization is a solid TPM.
00:44:16 - Anthony Campolo
Technical project manager.
00:44:19 - Domitrius Clark
So your job when you do DevRel is not only to be the executor, but also the strategist, also the planner, also the project creator, the tracker, and the follow-through.
00:44:32 - Anthony Campolo
Dude, yeah. Oh my God. I could talk so much about this because when I started at StepZen, it was a small company and they wanted me to be the entire... like you're saying, all of those things. My first time even doing DevRel.
00:44:44 - Domitrius Clark
Exactly, exactly. Yeah. And a lot of people get into DevRel and maybe they're seniors or something, it's their first time doing DevRel, and so they know how to execute on things. But it's not like they're good at... you're going to get told no a ton of times. You're going to deal with a lot of politics. There is so much more than just the doing of the...
00:45:03 - Anthony Campolo
Job. And the strategy is much harder than people think. It's like, you can create content. Anyone can create content, can come up with a thousand content ideas. Is it the right content?
00:45:11 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah. And should you be doing content? Does that need to be the focus at this...
00:45:14 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:45:14 - Domitrius Clark
Do I need to be talking about the product yet? Are we there? That is an important question to be asking, and I will fight that fight.
00:45:22 - Anthony Campolo
We put out content for a product that's not even good yet.
00:45:25 - Domitrius Clark
Dude, I tell people every time, every interview I've ever taken... and this is why I've gone through a ton of interviews, and I always keep interviewing, even if I'm really satisfied with... you should be. Just to see, A, what are other companies still valuing me as? Not even monetarily, but staying on your toes, dude. But like, what do you think I am? What do you think I do? And that helps me, A, if I ever have to work with that company as a partner or if I ever do want to go work for that company. But the big kind of misstep that a lot of these companies have is that they have no understanding that the level of juggling that they're going to ask from you also exists outside of all of the strategy and planning that you have to do to get there. And you almost have to be strategic and planning on the run.
00:46:15 - Anthony Campolo
Right.
00:46:17 - Domitrius Clark
Cool.
00:46:17 - Anthony Campolo
We're getting close to the hour. I think we need to... We could talk for our next guest soon, so probably start wrapping it up here. Let our listeners know any final thoughts before we start closing it out.
00:46:29 - Domitrius Clark
If you're hiring for DevRel, be more upfront about your expectations. If you're running a community, provide more value. If you see me, come and talk to me. If you want to ask me questions, DM me. I am an open book.
00:46:43 - Anthony Campolo
He's a good time.
00:46:44 - Domitrius Clark
I'll literally... as you see, we just had to wrap me up because I will literally babble on.
00:46:48 - Scott Steinlage
I would love to go...
00:46:49 - Domitrius Clark
I would love to go for another hour. Find me again. I'd love to do more. I love talking to you guys.
00:46:54 - Scott Steinlage
Totally.
00:46:55 - Anthony Campolo
Do you do Twitter Spaces as much?
00:46:56 - Domitrius Clark
So I, in my transition to leadership, have moved away from the doing of things for the most part.
00:47:03 - Anthony Campolo
I mean, just like showing up, just like in your own time.
00:47:05 - Domitrius Clark
Do I show up to them? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I actually want to get, like I said, I actually want to get back to... I want to do my stream again. I miss streaming. Cool. I miss doing things. You get so wrapped up in moving your career forward that sometimes you lose the fun stuff you used to do.
00:47:18 - Anthony Campolo
I know that.
00:47:19 - Domitrius Clark
And I miss the fun stuff. So I'd like to get much more involved in things.
00:47:22 - Anthony Campolo
So let's do some fun stuff.
00:47:23 - Domitrius Clark
Let's do some fun stuff together. Hell yeah. Hell yeah.
00:47:25 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah.
00:47:25 - Domitrius Clark
All right, cool. Oh, try Xata out and let me know what you think. And I really am excited to see more of the community trying it. And tell us what you think sucks, right? I'm open. Xata.io.
00:47:41 - Scott Steinlage
Xata.
00:47:42 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah, whatever you want to call it.
00:47:43 - Anthony Campolo
Six-letter domain, whatever you call it.
00:47:45 - Domitrius Clark
Come find us. Our Discord is a great place for us. DM me if you have any issues. And then if you want to talk about community, you want to talk about Discords, find me on Twitter. I'm that on every platform. I'm an open book. I love to talk to the community. So thanks, y'all, so much for having me. I really, really enjoyed this.
00:48:05 - Anthony Campolo
Thank you.
00:48:05 - Scott Steinlage
Thank you.
00:48:05 - Anthony Campolo
Really great talking with you.
00:48:06 - Domitrius Clark
Peace.
00:48:07 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah. We'll see you...
00:48:11 - Domitrius Clark
The next JavaScript Jam.
00:48:14 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah.
00:48:14 - Domitrius Clark
Yeah.
00:48:17 - Anthony Campolo
Awesome, man. It's great.