When should I hire my first Developer Advocate?

This is part of my series of “The State of DevRel Report”. We’ll add the link to the full list later.

The current landscape

Here are the most common heuristics I’ve heard around when to hire your first developer advocate:

• The developer advocate to employee ratio should be 1:50 at minimum, but closer to 1:100
• Post product market fit
• After a Series A

These general guidelines are in evolution. Honeycomb.io hired their first developer advocate at 25 employees (the amazing Liz Fong), largely because the founder (Charity Majors) is a prominent developer advocate herself. At ~100 employees, they have 4 developer advocates. They recent raised their Series B.

If you’re thinking about hiring your first developer advocate, you should think about what you want their business goal to be. Here are a few I’ve seen:

• To promote thought leadership around our technical direction
• To interface with users and improve the product
• To drive growth and adoption through company brand awareness
• To code SDKs and write documentation

While all developer advocates are cross-functional to some degree, your first developer advocate tends to be even more so. It’s best to narrow down their goal as explicitly as you can. Failing to do so will create a misleading job description and the resulting employee unhappiness that comes from it.

Thought leadership example

When you’re thinking about your goal, you should consider what type of offering you have. For example, if your technology forces people to adopt a behavior or mindset change, you’ll want to invest in thought leadership. Consider Netlify and Jamstack. The concept of Jamstack has now been adopted by a lot of companies and people, but Netlify was the first company to pioneer the idea. Netlify is now synonymous with Jamstack the way Honeycomb is synonymous with Observability.

Growth example

On the other hand, let’s say you’re BackBlaze building an alternative to an existing, well known product like AWS S3. You don’t need someone to promote thought leadership around why we should store things in the cloud. Instead you need someone who can drive top of funnel growth for your product.

It’s never too late to hire your first developer advocate, but it can definitely be too early. Make sure you evaluate your business goals, consider the state of your product, and whether or not you can properly enable your developer advocate to succeed.