What investors want from your DevRel program

Ashley Smith:: Hello. Hi. Good to see you.

Matthew Revell: So Ashley, can you introduce yourself as what your background's been, what your relationship to DevRel is?

Ashley Smith:: Yeah, so based in New York City, have lived between San Francisco and New York over the last 13 years when I've been working in startups. Background is in engineering. My first job was at Twilio in the first 20 where everyone was doing DevRel. I think everyone has the Twilio T-shirt with the little wires that go through it. I still see that on the street sometimes it make me so happy. But that was our first version of DevRel and then obviously it got taken to be much more scientific, I'll call it. Was it Parse? After that LED kind of go to market, left there, went to GitLab, first 10 people was a CMO. There managed DevRel of course with the other marketing sides, our marketing pieces as well as the pre-sales, BDR stuff.

And then was it GitHub, 18 months prior to the acquisition. So the 18 months leading in the acquisition, managed DevRel and also all the other pieces of marketing design.

Lots of good pieces after that. Advising pretty much all of my career. Decided to make that into a real thing. Worked at a company or a fund called OpenView as a venture partner. Led the work there at Build Kite, which is we have a DeVere organization. There was the lead investor and board member. And every other deal I've ever worked on has been DevRel a dev tool company as well. It's kind of all I know. It's all I enjoy doing, which I've learned. And most recently I have my own seed fund. It's called Familiar Cliff Ventures. I live in Utah sometimes and hike a lot. So I just named it after what I love. And doing seed deals only in companies that focus on making the developers' lives easier. So I have not ventured very far away from where I started and love that I've been the exec. So I know what we're looking as leaders from a DevRel organization, but also as an investor. I know when someone's not quite understanding that building a community is super important to the success of their developer tool and so how to point that out and also help them measure that. So I've been on both sides of the table and really enjoy it. Is that helpful?

Matthew Revell: Yeah, that's great. Thanks. Awesome. I think there's a lot of variety in the backgrounds of people who are working in running dev rail teams and some, I would say probably most of the people I come across don't really have much exposure to the world of venture capital. Other than that, it's a fact of life, of the funding model of the company that they work in, but they don't understand how it works. They don't understand investor priorities or that kind of thing. So I think there's maybe a bit of mystery, but also perhaps a little bit of nervousness around what these shadowy figures are expecting. And because DevRel gets scrutinized and doesn't always have the best metrics, it feels like a recipe for a, not resentment, but a little bit of friction, let's say. So what I'd like to ask you then is what is it that, let's take a step right back. Do VCs even care about DevRel?

Ashley Smith:: Absolutely. So not all of them, and I can't speak for every VC on the planet, I don't want to. But the ones that are investing in dev tools and software and that really kind of care about this space, most of them will say DevRel is super important. They may not be able to go many layers deeper than that, but they know that we need to build a community. And so for a long time I would get calls from people being like, we need to build a community. I'm like, great, great idea then. So no one actually kind of knew what that meant. To your point about shadowy figures, one thing I've noticed that happens is a lot of early founders will say things like the board says, the board says, and it becomes very scary because at Twilio, or when I was earlier in my career, I had no idea what a board did.

I had no idea what VCs were. I just knew they would come to our weird developer drink up and I would give them alcohol, which is, in retrospect probably not how I should have interacted, but it's a little bit scary. And so there's been a lot of instances I've seen where founders will use that fear to kind of be like, Hey, this, because our investors are going to watch it. It's not exactly, that's not what happens. The conversation that should happen is, here are our goals. Here is how your work ties to those goals. How are you going to create tactics, campaigns, events, content, yada, yada, yada. That directly impacts these goals that we then present to the board. And then they give feedback. Therefore it takes the scariness out of it. And it also is much more clear on why we're doing what we do versus de go get more users. That's really not like, okay, that means we want to increase users. Why, okay, we're trying to sell this product. Great. And so if you tie it back to goals versus just saying, the board says we need to do this. We're spending too much money on X, it becomes scary. And then people kind of start to resent VCs and board members from that angle. I think that was the point about shadowy.

Matthew Revell: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I remember also earlier in my career, the idea that there were these people who had, it was almost like kind of Roman gods. They were inaccessible, but they had an intense interest in what you were doing and they would sit around and make decisions about your future, but you couldn't influence that. But yeah. So then let's try and take away some that mystery. What are the things that DevRel people can report up to their own management that can then filter through to investors to help them get a picture of the value that DevRel is bringing?

Ashley Smith:: Yeah, I mean it really just depends on the size or the stage of the company. If you're looking at, let's call it early stage, so CA, you're the first Debra hire at the company, you're going to be much more involved and you're going to be tied to every single metric, probably the company is tracking, including revenue, which can be scary for some people that work in DevRel. So what I would do is sit down with, if your manager is the CEO, if your manager is the chief product officer, whoever is you're working with directly, I would sit down and say, which metrics do you expect me to influence? Go hide away somewhere, come up with a plan. Here's what I'm going to do. There are these five pieces of content that are going to go piss off developers and we're going to try and get them to complain about it on Twitter or whatever.

Here are all these events we're going to go to. We're give talks. I'm a huge fan of workshops and tutorials and teaching. So here's the kind of teaching content we're going to use and we think that we're going to get X amount of engagement, X amount of eyes on it. We think that we will get five signups from these key logo companies we're trying to go after. You can tie it all the way back. And so I think that's a great way to do it. If you're in a bigger DevRel organization, let's say that you're on a team managed by a DevRel manager, a lot of times what I've always done is kind of specialize each of my derail people so that they're not just out there going after go after everyone. Someone's could be for colleges and students. So maybe your goal is to go interact at 10 different universities and work at a hackathon a year there and then maybe get, I dunno, 10 projects and each hackathon using your product or 50% of every project at this hackathon is using Twilio or whatever.

And here, remember we had some of those goals. You might be focused on enterprise developers. And the thing about this concept of enterprise developers is they're just developers, which for some reason, a lot of people don't realize that it's just a developer at work. That person goes home and is still a developer. So a lot of times you see the segment of independent developer and enterprise developer, and I kind of blend the two when I talk because I don't know about y'all, but a lot of my friends and people that I know will go toy around with the product while they're at home working on some silly thing like hooking up their doorbell to a robot, which is long story, but that's actually happened. And then they'll later on be like, how can I figure out how to use this at work because I love this product, I enjoy it.

Or there's a use case that pops up. So figuring out that piece, that connection is super important. So let's say you have a hundred signups a day for your company, good job. If you have that many, let's say 10 of them are from an enterprise company with more than a thousand developers or a hundred developers, whatever that segment is, if you can show that you've influenced any of those via your content a talk, any of the things we kind of talked about to sign up, there's your metric. That is the metric. The VCs are going to be like, oh my God, including your leadership team, your VC team, your manager. Everyone's going to just be like, oh, cool, that's great. So figuring out how to measure that piece is the part that I've always found most valuable for larger organizations. When you're DevRel and a small company, you're doing everything and you're influencing every single metric, which I enjoy.

Robin Purohit: Yeah, I love your comment about trying to link what you're doing and you're measuring to some goal that is appropriate for the phase of the business. So I've heard from some folks, especially the early days, there's certain things they know are critical to go well for them to accelerate interest or adoption of their product. And they focus a laser on those one or two things, whether it's a point of friction or a certain feature that they know is the way that they're going to acquire and they obsess about that. So you can put all those activity and content metrics and sentiment scores in that context for the board so they have a good feeling of progress or how you're overcoming the friction.

Ashley Smith:: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I just did a deal, and when I say deal, I'm this in a super awesome startup that I am obsessed with the founders. I love the product. It's called patch tech. And we just had this conversation yesterday, me the two founders, I was like, what is our, who are the 10 types of companies that we want to get in the next year? Okay, how are we going to do that? That's really kind of DevRel. I know that it gets squished into marketing and sales as you get bigger. But in an early stage company, everything is kind of DevRel. Like I said, at Twilio being in the first 20, we were all doing DevRel. I was going to events, I was setting up really bad marketing Operation Pipeline really bad, should not have been doing, I was answering the actual call.

So it's interesting that people like me who are either on the board or invested in your company are going to say, how are we going to get to those first 10 test customers in this first year? If you're a really early stage company? And that's where my brain kicks in. It's like, okay, there's there a community of people we should go to. Who do we need to go work with to get test users? Is there content we create? And so you're right, it's all about stage. I love early stage, later stage stuff. You just look at the company goals and you figure out what you can do to hook in to those things and then go do really cool programs and campaigns to influence those numbers.

Robin Purohit: People in the ways that take the shroud of mystery off for people who are in DevRel that don't talk to VCs, it's always about the next milestone. What's the next milestone? How are you using your cash and resource to get to the next milestone?

Ashley Smith:: Yeah, and don't waste money, obviously. Even we've all seen money being wasted in crazy, crazy, crazy ways for me over the last decade. I'm just like, what are you doing? But now I think people are being a bit more frugal with how they spend, and we're having to show what the ROI return on investment is a bit more, which I love. I get very anxious about spending money that seems like I shouldn't be spending it. I don't know if that's just my natural way, but I want to make sure because I know that the money I spend needs to do something that might just be like brand lift. And some people are like, brand lift's not a real thing. And there's other things you can call it totally is a thing. If someone's evaluating two products and the development team saw you at an event talking about a really cool way to do X, Y, and Z using this products, they're going to go with the one that they've heard before.

It's the same concept when you see stupid political signs on the side of the road here in the us, people put more signs out because the more times you see the name, the more obviously you're going to just check that box, which is super sad, but that's why they do it. So brand recognition is a huge thing. It can be hard to manage, and I know that it can be hard to measure. I know that Orbit is doing a great job of figuring out how to do that, and I think that's why I've always been a huge fan of the Orbit team, but don't ever ignore the fact that brand lift is important. It's not just about we drove revenue. It should also be about brand air coverage, whatever you want to call it.

Matthew Revell: If there are good things that DevRel people can be doing to report back up, are there things that DevRel teams do that might act as a red flag? You mentioned that people have been quite loose with money, particularly in DevRel teams. There's been lots of travel, there's been lots of, Hey, we'll throw 20,000 at this event and see what happens. And then you find that nobody's actually got a strategy for measuring the impact of that spend. But are there things that you could advise DevRel teams to avoid doing so as not to scare off investors?

Ashley Smith:: Yeah, or just to scare off anybody. It's okay to throw money at things that you're not sure if what's going to work or not. You should save some of your budget, assuming you have a budget, because some early stage folks, you don't even have. There's no budget. You're just like, let's see what works. But don't be afraid to test things because you don't want to be too conservative with your spend. So don't be afraid to say like, Hey, we're going to take 20% or 25% of our budget this quarter, this week, whatever your timeframe is, and do some fun experimental stuff. We're going to this weird event and somewhere we're going to have to spend a little bit of money and we're going to buy a lemonade stand that gives out lemonade that's branded. I dunno what it's right. That's great. You should also make sure that you highlight that some of the work that we do that is free.

There's no spend on good content. There's emotional spend and there's your salary that's going into the time you're spent to create it. But don't be afraid to put not a dollar value, but explain how important that is. Another thing I see as a big miss that I've screamed about forever, I think, is if you go to an event and give a talk, that piece of content should become 10 pieces of content. If you're going to an event, publish your slides, duh, create a quick blog post. It's a social media campaign. Do a video recording of it, figure out a decent background and record it. And then don't be afraid to kind of rework it for different audiences and put it out there more than once. So I think that when you are spending, say 20 K in an event, that's kind of a test event. If you come back with five email addresses of people that might be interested in being either a tester of the product or want to help you, give you a feature request or anything that's useful, feature requests are useful to building product roadmaps and to improving the product. So think of a way to value that, but also just be like, Hey, we spent 20 grand, sure, but we also got this great piece of content that we can then go use and create 10 different campaigns around.

Matthew Revell: And you also touched on the idea that some of the environment right now is changing. And so in that case, if money's becoming tighter and people are becoming perhaps a little more conservative in their investments as a department that perhaps sometimes isn't as measured, what would you advise DevRel leaders to be looking at right now to frankly ensure the survival of their team over the next year or two?

Ashley Smith:: Yeah, totally. I think that stay away from the hand waviness of DevRel. And that doesn't mean, doesn't mean change any tactics. It totally just means here are buckets. Do we get developer feedback into the product? Great, we're doing that. Are we in control of content and making sure that good content goes out? Great. Here's how we're doing that. Just be very, very clear about what you're influencing. Make sure leadership agrees. Make sure that if y'all have board meetings, it's not a bad idea. This is scary to do, but it's not a bad idea before board meetings. And you can ask when they're, it's not that secret. They're either quarterly, sometimes monthly, sometimes less. It's not a bad idea to be like, Hey, can I provide a slide for you that you can put in the appendix of the board deck just so that in case they have questions or want to understand, they can see the things that we're working on, the metrics we're influencing and whatever single slide, super easy.

Or here's a one pager memo that you can pass up to the board members. I love that because I really enjoy understanding that side of it. As someone who's managed DevRel and built DevRel teams and done the work, I spend time with the person usually that works in DevRel at the company that I invest in. It can be one meeting, it can be more. I have one that I meet with weekly and we kind of just talk about what we're working on. Don't be afraid to get to know the investors. If you're early stage enough, you're probably going to interact with them. We aren't scary. The ones I've worked with are, were terrifying on paper, but in reality were super helpful and have been helpful in my career throughout the years. So my advice is don't be afraid to just create a piece of one pager that's like, here's what we're doing, because that's what you're supposed to be doing, right? You're a good communicate. Your group is meant to communicate. Build a slide, build a one pager, pass it off to the board, measure everything, tie it back to goals, and you can waste a little bit of money, but waste that money knowing that it could be one of those really exciting things that takes off. Don't be afraid to experiment and don't get too conservative in the work that you're doing.

Robin Purohit: I think your point about not being in flagwaving mode right now is, I think good advice to any leader, anybody actually in a startup, this is how a strategic BI function is more of here's what we're doing and here's how it affects the result. And we're learning even sometimes you make mistakes and it's okay, right? So we tried this, it didn't work, we're not doing it again. Here's how we're course correcting, right?

Ashley Smith:: Yeah. I love a good, this is so, I don't know, it feels like enterprise, old school, whatever, but I love a red green yellow chart so I can be like, green is really working yellow. We got to figure it out red. We tried it. It didn't work really well because anytime someone's like, everything's great. I'm like, I have worked at startups. Nothing is always great. Something's broken.

Robin Purohit: It's super important to hear from VCs, right? Startups are about rapid experimentation and doubling down the things that work and not doing the things that don't work. And so you don't want, people don't want people to get into a mode where they're not trying stuff, right? Yeah. Discipline behind you should keep innovating.

Ashley Smith:: And I'm always pushing people, what's that one? The other conversation the other day, I was like, what is the controversial thing about your product? Because we're creating a category. So if you're creating a category, you're going to make someone angry. For Parse, for example, backend is a service that'll ever work and it got killed by Facebook, so maybe it didn't work, whatever. But that was a controversial thing saying that, oh, backend, you can just outsource it. There's the controversy. Twilio, you don't need phones. You can do it all via API. There's the controversy. And so I think that figuring out what that thing is that might be a little bit testy for some people and working with that, that could be your experimentation. I remember whenever Facebook acquired Parse, obviously our budget went up. I didn't have a budget. I was allowed spending $10,000 a month, which for the number of developers we brought in is not a lot of money. Facebook was like here. And so we went and rented an ice cream truck at South by Southwest one year and just gave out free pars ice cream. And today I would kind be like, did that matter? I dunno.

I dunno if that mattered. Is there audience even there maybe at the time that were mobile developers and that's when all the VCs were screaming, mobile apps, mobile apps. So maybe it made sense, but things like that can also be pretty awesome. So just don't be afraid to go do some fun stuff and just don't make your DevRel be boring for the sake of like, oh no, don't spend money. Robin Purohit: Yeah, it was kind of weird as I'm also an angel investor as well as been an operator. I've also found the fastest way to kill innovation is too much money too quickly because you don't think about what you really need to do and how to do it creatively. You just throw money at the problem for all the obvious stuff that everybody else is doing,

Ashley Smith:: Or you just hire more people that end up doing less. What I really enjoy is figuring out content and tutorials, workshops, there's all these things you can do, and teaching is the best way to get people to buy into what you're working on and actually give you feedback and be helpful. So I like coming at DevRel a place of teaching as well as spending money on T-shirts and rewarding your community with things like that. But anytime I've hired anyone in DevRel who came to me with a giant budget and there was nothing on there that was the free stuff. I'm always like, let's figure out, let's make that blend a little bit better. And as a vc, it's got to be both. Especially now with the pandemic events, there's more of them I feel like, and they're all online, so travel is decreased in price, so we can do more. But then you get burnout when you're traveling a ton. So it's, there's a whole delicate balance, but I think it's about spending dollars, but it's also about using your time wisely and creating great things that may not cost budget money.

Robin Purohit: Can you talk a bit more about the controversy part? Because I think my experience talk to a lot of people in the Dore industries that education is a huge part of it. So education by intent, you think, how do I be helpful? But sometimes also people are gravitated towards things that challenge them, balance those two things being helpful versus maybe challenging to think differently.

Ashley Smith:: I think both, right? I get bored when someone's just agreeing with the way I should be building something. Like, yes, you do this and that and this. I'm like, okay. But I, when someone's like, if you consiDevReld adding this layer between which is going to make your life so much easier and two years time, and then I'm like, oh, no, we shouldn't do that, then it's the security issue. Okay, well maybe they've solved for that. Well, and so I kind of enjoy that piece. And so I like having that conversation. So when I say controversy, it's not even the negative connotation of the word controversy, it's more just challenge the way I was going to build. Because if we didn't, we would all still be using terrible tools 20 years ago. So all the best things that came out and redefined the category at first, everyone's like, no, we're not going to do that.

Twilio, right? We're still going to use that weird thing where you put the phones and do this, and we're not doing that anymore. It's a simple API call Pars was push notifications, which I now hate, but it was really, really hard to set up push notifications, and we were just like, here you go. Look, it's super easy. Then it got overused. Imagine collaborating on code without GitHub or GitLab. We can still do it, but it's a nightmare. It's still kind of a nightmare sometimes. But those are those moments of controversy or challenge that you need to find and you need to build content around it and training around it, because otherwise people are going to keep doing what they've been doing forever. Robin Purohit: And controversy usually the reason why people work with a startup, not a big company.

Ashley Smith:: Exactly. Yeah. It's also what makes it super exciting.

Matthew Revell: But also going back to that Twilio era, by which I mean the time when Twilio defined what DevRel meant or technical evangelism meant for a lot of people back then, it was easy in some respects just to go and buy developers a load of beer because even if not all developers were beer drinkers, you could hit a good number of people by going into a city and GitHub did the drink up early on and that kind of thing. Whereas now, because so much money is chasing a developer attention, I think if you don't have a point of view, whether it's to speak to your point on controversy, then no one's going to pay any attention to you anyway. So yeah, I think being opinionated at the very least is important.

Ashley Smith:: Yeah, I love when people are opinionated to an extent, and I love that when you can have a healthy conversation about something that everyone's passionate about and the deaf community, and there's still, I enjoy getting coffee with people and talking about random developer related things still, right? That's been trickier lately, but I don't know if the drink up are still as fun as they used to be. Back in my day, they were a lot of fun. We would also have ping pong and have always a signature non-alcoholic drink, drink, and I loved it, and I wish that, I think we're going to have a resurgence of that sort of thing because everyone kind of misses hanging out with each other, I think. But you're right, it's got to be from a brand or a set of brands that the products actually matter and you care about to want to go and have those conversations and meet people working on it.

Matthew Revell: So there are certain investors that people know of who specifically go after developer tools. So I guess heavy bit comes to mind as one fund. And then OpenView are doing all the stuff in product led growth, and we had a round table with them yesterday, well, with one of them, not the entire company. And then what you're doing with Vermilion Cliffs. So when it comes to learning a bit more about how to interact with VCs, are there people out there that you would recommend DevRel leaders go and seek out on the internet to find what they're publishing or what they're saying on social media?

Ashley Smith:: Yeah, I hide from social media. It's probably my worst and best trait. So I'm the wrong person to ask who to follow on social media. Don't follow me, because the only thing I tweet is if someone tweets at me that I'm speaking and I'll retweet it, I'm going to get better about it. I swear. Honestly, the way that I feel more empowered when I'm working with the VC community is by learning what everything means. So confusing, just like the basics of fundraising, the basics of any of it, the basics of stock options, the basics of board meetings. It is all so confusing. So would probably, and what I did is I went and just educated myself about what does all this mean? AngelList has a ton of good resources. Obviously the heavy bit content is way more developer focused and incredible. OpenView has great product growth stuff.

I think it's less about what is a VC's perspective, because every VC has a different perspective and they're all somehow right or wrong. I really like just having the knowledge of what it actually means, because again, when I started working in tech, I had an engineering background, came into startups, had no idea what venture meant, didn't realize that we were taking money from these strange people who had lots of money to give to us. And then there were these board meetings, and I knew we had goals, but I didn't know why we had goals. I knew we wanted to make money, but I didn't know that we needed to get, none of that was clear. And it's more clear now, I think, because it's more talked about. But I think just educating yourself on what all those pieces are is great. And then don't be afraid to talk to the founders of your company, or if you're a founder, making sure that you're communicating it to your company.

Like, Hey, we have a board meeting in a month. The goals of this board meeting, we're going to make sure that everyone's aware of what our product roadmap is. Here's why that matters. That matters because it shows momentum in the product. That also matters because shipping things that people have been requesting, which we know from our dev rail team. So just either ask the questions or make sure you're communicating if you're a founder, I think is a great way to get involved. And then if you do work at a company that has got some of the top developer investors on the planet, don't be afraid to reach out and say, Hey, would you mind either introducing me to people, other people within y'all's portfolio that are also working in DevRel? Or do y'all have resources that you like to share with the people doing developer tools, companies in your portfolio? Because most of them do. My fund is tiny, and I am just a single person with a very part-time associate that I go find deals, I invest in them, but I'm a seed fund. A lot of the bigger funds are going to have all this stuff set up. It might even have events at some point. I'll have all those things, but I'm still on fund one. Matthew Revell: We're coming to actually the end of our time together by the looks of it, which is surprising to me that it went that quickly. But I guess, Robin, do you have any other comments or questions?

Robin Purohit: Well, just maybe one. As people graduate from investors like you that are very savvy and maybe a little bit more hands-on and aware of Dev Rel, and now you're getting to that series A stage where things get more serious and more economically driven. How does the conversation change? So DevRel people aware of, Hey, we're at this next big milestone. We got a big check. Now we've got a scale top line. How should they change what they think about what they communicate, et cetera?

Ashley Smith:: Honestly, I wouldn't change it that much. I would just be more specific. So all the companies I've worked out have been series A, B, and Beyond. The companies I've invested in have been Seed and A. And the only difference I've found that if someone's a seed company, everyone's kind of doing DevRel series A, everyone's doing DevRel, but you're hiring probably a DevRel person if you are that person with the title DevRel or whatever your title is. But you're doing DevRel as a function, just make sure that the company has set out goals and that before you're hired, when you're in the interview process, learn, how am I going to be measured? What are the expectations of me? Am I going to roll into marketing? Am I rolling into product? Am I rolling into engineering? If you're rolling into sales or sales engineer, that's more of the role.

So just figure out how the structure is going to work. Is there a structure longer term that they know about they've already thought about? And then what are the goals to be measured on? And then when you work on your 30, 60, 90 day plan, make sure that in that plan, part of it is these are goals, here are the tactics. Here's the budget I need. Do we agree? Okay, great. We agree. I'm going to go do my job. I'd love to give a board update. I need five minutes in the board meeting. I'd love to give a board update once a year, once every six months, whenever it is. And even if it's just a slide like I mentioned, that's another great way to get ahead of it.

Robin Purohit: Awesome.

Ashley Smith:: Yeah, if anyone has specific questions or wants to talk more about this stuff, this is the stuff that I really enjoy talking about It's easy to find me. I'm on social media. You can find me on Twitter. I don't my handle, but if you find me, you can message I'll. Matthew Revell: Cool. Thanks. I just finish off from my point of view with a question around, for someone who's dealing for the first time with being leading a DevRel function in a venture invested company, is there one or two numbers that you would tell them to take away? Or is it just too variable from one company to the next?

Ashley Smith:: I mean, honestly, all companies are looking for the same stuff. When you're a venture capital fact startup, a RR annual recurving revenue, that's going to be one that you're always looking at. I wouldn't say that as a DevRel person, you're going to completely tie yourself to that number. But if you know that your company's goal for the year is to hit $1 million in a RRR or 2 million in rrr, maybe a third or half of what you're working on, try and kind of directly tie it back. So that might even be something as simple as, I'm going to create 10 pieces of content. They're going to get 10,000 views. Each of those 10,000 views, five people are going to sign up. And of those five people, one person's going to become a paid $5 per month member or whatever it is. It can just be as simple as that. But just tie it back to that revenue number and it's all guesswork. We don't know. The joy of being in a startup is, it's not scientific yet. It's not as repeatable as you want it to be. So you're kind of guessing, and then you're going to look three months in, look at the data and change it around Brand lift. I hate that idea, but the idea of figuring out word of mouth tracking, word of mouth, which I think is something that is so important to the growth of every company I've ever worked on, that I've ever invested in. When I invested in Build Kit afterwards, I went and talked to every single of the customers that were over a certain threshold to be like, how'd you hear about us? Oh, I heard about you from this event I went to where Keith, the CEO was speaking, or, oh, so-and-So from so-and-so told me about this product.

So measuring that, oh my God. And we could tie almost every single deal back to word of mouth. And so there's a point in a company's trajectory where that's the case, especially for good products. And I would like to think that all dev tools are good products. Maybe not the case, but word of mouth. If you can figure out how you want to measure that and quantify it, write it down. We're going to influence 500 people. Here's the goal, here's why it matters. And then if you're really good at your job and you got to get a sales leader or a chief revenue officer say, Hey, can we do a survey of every closed customer that's over a certain amount and ask them how they heard about their product? I guarantee you a very high percentage is going to say, oh, I saw so-and-so at De Conn giving a talk about blah.

And then one day I really realize I the thing because it's a problem that makes sense. I'm like that piece. People don't realize how important that is, but it's always the case as someone who I talk to, almost every customer that I think Twilio had in the first few years, and then all of it stay close to your customers. Ask where they heard about you and who that developer was within that company that brought the product in. I guarantee you probably word of mouth or in some community online or read a piece of content, saw a tweet, et cetera. So I would say those two metrics.

Matthew Revell: Great. Thank you. Alright, that's awesome. Well, Ashley, thank you so much for joining us.