Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (00:00)
Hey everyone, today we're diving into one of the most interesting shifts in developer marketing, which is creator led growth. And if you also notice the rise of developer YouTubers, indie hackers, and community educators who are actually shaping adoption decisions, this conversation is for you. And to unpack this, today we have with us Neil Gernon, who's the founder of Plug.dev. It's a platform which helps DevTool companies connect with creators who truly influence how developers learn and buy.
Neill (00:06)
Thank
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (00:26)
So Neel, great to have you here. And before we dive in, we'd love to understand your journey and then what led you to start plug.dev and give us a bit of an overview about what plug.dev does.
Neill (00:27)
I'm
Sure, yeah. So we effectively, we're kind of known for influencer. Everyone goes like plug.dev influencers, we refer to ourselves as the creator platform for DevTools. So that means we effectively build and manage both creator programs and influencer programs, which I know we're gonna talk about later. on a daily, we're quite lucky that we get to work with
some of fastest growing dev tools in the world, and we're class growth operators like Suburbase or Clerk and Snyk, a whole lot more. And so that's always a cool part of our job. ⁓ But how we actually do it is maybe a little bit different. we essentially took the decision like really early on to
invest in the foundational assets that would help us do their job. so early on, we built a platform on which everything is delivered. I built the network and community before I the company. And so the platform sits on top of that kind of community, the large community of creators that code on the internet to our knowledge, which is useful when you've had extra problems, you can dip into Discord and like have chats.
You asked my background. So
I started in London in basically I was building developer communities for like 10 I started off in information security in London, ended back in Dublin, building an AI community both times, pretty successful,
And so it was always some way to like community focus for me. what I had actually noticed was it's kind of a typical dev rel problem of hard to articulate or quantify the value of your dev rel work or community work.
I ended up kind of overnight, running Dev influencer campaigns for companies like Post Hog, Didn't really know what I was doing. We're kind of learning what it was. fast forward, I ended up leaving company at some time. I was having a baby, doing some life stuff. And a little while later,
started plug to really double down and optimize for developer specific GTM with creators that code or this kind of category of like content and distribution in one that kind of in mind.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (02:40)
do you see a shift in how DevTools are going to market today? And is there more acceptance of creator led growth or was that always happening and we've just now defined the term.
Neill (02:50)
And yeah, there's of course changes. like AI SEO, AEO, GEO that's a headache for companies. but from from our perspective, perspective, a lot of the companies that we speak to, it's like
There was a lot of experimentation this year and people got a little more informed and are getting a bit more concrete going into next year, I think. And there's still the same kind of sentiment within the cloud. If you're asking the right questions, companies are still in search for distribution channels
So what I mean by that is like, do you have an open source community? Do you have a Discord channel?
So trying to look at those like the broad creators that code category is like distribution content, what can we do? And a lot of companies still ask what if we did this? There's a lot of experimentation, which I love. We geek out on, we think is really cool.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (03:25)
it.
Neill (03:31)
People are getting really creative with it to differentiate themselves. But then going back and realizing that even like just going in an influencer can do a lot of those things. You can create and scale content production. You can get that distribution partnerships.
Several audits have started kind of ranking higher with the content pieces, including like YouTube shorts and not just long form, So yeah, there's
A lot of change, a lot of questions, there's more experimentation. Still in search for distribution, still in search to iron out the headaches to enable them, scale the production of content, figure out AI. And we find a lot of people are ending up on the creator-led category because it can tick a lot of those boxes. That's our bias perspective, but that's what we see.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (04:03)
Mm-hmm.
No, I think that's fair. And I think in the age of AI, you need to do a lot of experiments and you need to stand out. Otherwise, you just get lost in the sea of content that is out there. So I think that's fair. And Neel, so in your perspective, why is creator-led growth, why does it work so well for developers? Is it because developers, by their nature, they want to learn, they want to understand new things, they're always looking out for content? What has been your perspective here?
Neill (04:18)
Yeah.
totally.
And I think a lot of companies are asking themselves, what are the resources we have? What is the fundamental facts of the resources we have? What is the fundamental facts about our ICP? And I know they realize, okay, right, this is the scenario. We're looking to marry these things, content distribution, our ICP is in these categories and in a route
to get to that ICP is partnering with these guys and you need a vehicle to do that. And so I think that was at least foundational for us over the past couple of years, but then I do think
with that there's been more experiments with that there's been more kind of knowledge sharing within within the community and there's been ⁓ there's been use cases shared and now just on the company side companies have realized that just on the influencer side it started to work for them
So it's like they're all in on understanding that like in this instant, in this Excel spreadsheet, what is the CPM rate and what is this transactional relationship between me and this get that content out Mr. Influencer. It has drifted more onto strategic longer term partnerships.
so I think that's just like,
that's just value they realize they can tick all the boxes it's been well documented companies like Clark and the guys over there really double down and optimized for YouTube
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (05:43)
Mm-hmm.
Neill (05:47)
the three or four key partners and then a backlog of other other influences and in their their high priority partner category are generating like 15,000 conversions per partner Because they double down and optimize and what they knew was kind of working.
is companies realizing they can get creative. They can do different things. It's not just, OK, YouTube, but we've grown our marketing activity. How can we support that? We want to go broader for our launch weeks.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (06:13)
Make sense. So lot of use cases, know, it's not just, you know, so what I'm understanding is that there's a shift between, dev tools actually saying and doing like one-off partnerships to actually a more deeper strategic engagement where they're looking at, ⁓ creators and partners for a longer time. And then there are multiple activities that they sort of able to engage them with. So whenever they're doing events, can they sort of amplify that voice? If they're going regional, can they amplify that voice? So I think a lot of use cases and definitely a lot of
of exciting stuff there. But I think, Neil, then one of the most important thing becomes that how should companies actually think about selecting creators? And especially balancing the brand fit and still giving creators freedom to make content that performs. How would they sort of run that to make sure that creators are true to their craft?
Neill (07:01)
Yeah, so there's a whole lot of variables in this. It sounds like a really simple question. There's so many variables based on like your campaign or program type and the purpose of the engagement. ⁓ Because, you know, sometimes it actually, you can be a lot, you can be looser with the ICP and like that creator is not on brand for us, but they still have value depending on what it is you're doing.
I mean, there's a couple of base fundamental bullet points of like, do they make content that already hits your ICP? Are they already servicing your ICP, your customer profile? Are they knowledgeable about the kind of the other tools that are complementary to yours? Maybe they're already building with those tools so you can like really fit in and compliment the kind of natural developer workflow or then you can be a tool within their stack of choice, right?
And could you see yourself fitting in there?
And that's really important.
I guess it shouldn't be surprising to me, like a little bit surprising to me that they know like one or two of their favorite creators. They're like, I really like this guy. Cause I think like we've had some CEOs come on and they're like, yeah, we're looking for like to hire DevRel. We want to hire these YouTubers. So they tend to know, they're lot more educated. They tend to know about like, know, YouTubers they like. And so that's like the brand fit. Also your team is a good indicator. They're to know your marketing or DevRel folks are going to know.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (08:22)
Okay.
Neill (08:23)
But then it does get looser outside of that. you've like, you know, if you're just quite simply within the React ecosystem and maybe within that you've a niche that is partner types, but on the fringes you've just complete, maybe creators that you wouldn't want to create a long form tutorial for you and stick it on your website. Maybe that wouldn't be enough, but you'd be like, you know, we can partner with you for like, maybe do some drop-ins, maybe like join one of our launches.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (08:35)
Mm-hmm.
Neill (08:52)
Or we're pushing out a webinar. Can you help us amplify this? Could you share it into your niche newsletter or something like that? I'd say those two categories of like, you're going to know who are your high profile strategic partners. Are they really aligned with your brand in terms of like little things the tone and the cadence of how they teach the clarity in what is their teaching and the quality of the production.
and then the type of things that they are building and the other tools that they are using that complements your tool. So that's one, that's how I look at strategic partnerships. Other than that, companies, you can get a little bit looser, can be really effective to produce like general awareness campaigns. We're trying to amplify launch weeks, make some noise. That's a kind of a different book. You can be a bit looser with your ICP.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (09:27)
Mm-hmm.
sense.
Makes sense. And I just got curious. when companies are collaborating with these partners, how rigid is their brief? Or is it decided between the company and the creator? Or does the company dictate that this is how you should create? How does that happen generally?
Neill (09:52)
Yeah, no, I mean, we always advocate for that creators create. They know their ICP, they know their audience better than you. it can depend. Right. But ultimately, like if we were to stand over like our default kind of approach.
We advocate for letting critics create, if you like their content, understand how you can fit in to their content versus try to kind of sabotage and think, hey, this is really compliment to us. Let's do a video and just like make sure everything is about our brand. We tend to see that, like for example, a dedicated video on YouTube or something, they don't convert as well. And they're still valuable. I'd still make an argument for them being valuable, depending on the stage of the company and what you're trying to do on YouTube. If you're trying to build up some.
actual authority on the platform early on some smaller or micro influencers to do dedicated videos can kind of stamp some nice authority on that where like you as long as that video which then the dev rel team and dev marketing team can get more involved and to try to guide and to collaborate much closer with the creator on what do we want to take here that might be for just the general direction of the video how authoritative
you can be by aligning with key problem statements, thinking about it from an SEO perspective and more. That's all valuable, right? So that's one category. But in general, we usually advocate for let creators create, you like the content, try to fit in to what they are already creating.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (11:03)
Okay.
Got it. And is that the difference between companies that truly succeed with CLG from the ones who are still experimenting or are there any other factors that sort of contribute to that?
Neill (11:27)
I think the commonality is that they acknowledge what it is they're doing from a marketing perspective in-house, then ⁓ what is their unique kind of angle, and then they're leveraging influencers.
to support that. So if you look at someone like Clark, they took a pretty opinionated approach on partnerships, did a lot of experimentation, and then they found this kind of angle to double down and optimize for these creators that can give them long tail.
and
videos that convert really well. But they really took the approach of like, what we want to do is we want to compliment the creator and the video is not about us and we want to integrate in here because we're going to be the odd solution and they're going to, the Creators is going to use all these other great tools,
Okay, we need to keep doing this I'm going to keep on track with actually being good partners something Nobody talks about big difference. Everyone's talking about like, you know Is this one video attributable? What is the CPM rates like every gets data driven which you should
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (12:19)
Yes.
Neill (12:27)
Community sentiment is real. Virality
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (12:27)
Yeah.
Neill (12:30)
within niche closed private creator Discord is a very real thing. I've unfortunately seen companies trend negatively and positively. And to talk as an example, my point being of a company that has done that, has got into trending in the private YouTube discourse channels that I know of. And if you've reached that point, you've done something really well. ⁓
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (12:41)
about it.
Neill (12:55)
I think other companies as well, Snake, perfect example of, they have an in-house growing and marketing activity, they use creators for that. They know what they have internally, they want to amplify that. And they use creators per launch. Constant cadence every quarter, every maybe two months. They have a new thing, they have a webinar, they have a hackathon, they have a launch, they have a feature kind of that they want to push. And they use creators to amplify that.
bit more social, a bit more on Twitter, a bit more on LinkedIn, then goes into YouTube and kind of breadcrumbs as we call it in influencer playbook. And companies like SuppaBase, they want to amplify the two sides. They have like a creative program. have a big kind of creator, excuse me, not even a creator, they have a large community. They're open sourcing and discord community. And really what they're
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (13:31)
on it.
Mm-hmm.
Neill (13:53)
you know, that's an amazing asset for their launch week. So it's just so well known for it. They want to utilize that and gather the community around that, turn the community into creators, essentially. And then off the back of that, YouTube is a much maybe a bit more strategic outbound where they can also support activities like their conferences ⁓ that they had, that they have launched a little while ago.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (14:05)
Okay.
Neill (14:22)
So yeah, really depends, but acknowledge what you have internally and see what creators and influencers can support.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (14:32)
Understood. And these companies like Snyk and SuperBase, very interesting examples. So when they work with creators on a perennial basis, so you said that Snyk has a lot of internal hackathons, a lot of webinars, which they sort of amplify using these creators. So are these creators sort of fixed that, you know, now I'll work with these creators because I've seen them perform? Or do they keep experimenting and trying out new creators? How is that structured?
Neill (14:55)
best programs always continuously experiment. Even if you have, even if you're in at the phase of doubling down and optimizing for a thing, You still need to experiment to find more of the thing that's working, and number one, but also two, don't lean
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (15:08)
Yeah.
Neill (15:12)
on the presumption that like that is the the optimal thing if you're constraining yourself by doing more things. And what I mean by that is there is more companies getting more creative with influencer, as I said. So if you have one thing that's working, maybe that's fine. But again, if you go back to acknowledge what you have internally, what else can you utilize these creators for? Then that's where it gets interesting. Ultimately, this is like the whole kind of story that we advocate.
on creator led growth is to marry the inbound and outbound. Your outbound strategic partnerships with creators that you're targeting, but also you're in the house. So you want inbound creators. And that is like, for example, like Supabase right? Like your Neon has a creative program, Clerk has a creative program. What you want to make sure is that even if you're doing YouTube, which is outbound, you want to make sure that you have an open door policy.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (15:47)
Makes sense.
Neill (16:08)
for the creator community to come knock on your door and initiate a value exchange. In exchange for content, you give me X, could be cash, could be merch, could be premium access, could be any of those things. But that's the equivalent of like when companies, for us, when we look at that, companies don't have a creator program, you effectively have like your ICP coming to your website, they're signing up. But what if somebody
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (16:14)
Thanks.
Mm-hmm.
Neill (16:32)
a developer that's signing up to your website, but they happen to have an audience or can create content and you're not acknowledging or identifying that you're missing out on on serious value of having like turning the user into a creator and advocate for your brand. So the ultimate leverage is really to get the inbound and outbound motion of truly putting creator led growth into action, going out and getting strategic partnerships.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (16:45)
them.
Okay.
Neill (16:57)
incentivizing your community, your discord community, your open source community, whatever the case may be, or just like have that creative program listed on your website to check it out because you're doing more content. So if you have a creative program that is a value proposition to them.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (17:05)
Thanks.
Neill (17:10)
then suddenly you can catch a category of developer who may already be creating content about your brand and you just want to capture that and go, hey, that's awesome. In support of your work of creating content when you mention us, great, we're going to do a value exchange. We'll give you something back. When you start doing those two side by side, inbend and outbend motion, that's the kind of full flow that we talk about of kind creator led growth optimally being kind of in motion.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (17:18)
Makes sense.
Yeah, and I think that can be so powerful because this is almost very organic, right? Because this is your ICP, this is your community which really likes you, which has been using you. And if they are going out and if they are creating content, I think that can be the most authentic content. Because that's something that sort of comes from their experience. I think that's so powerful.
Very interesting and I think that's a great breakdown. But Neel, how do you then sort of for every GTM team, know, running any program, they need to understand what is it that they'll get out of it and what are some of the metrics that they should track. So with CLG, what do you feel are some of the metrics that really sort of move and how long does it typically take to see meaningful impact?
Neill (18:19)
you're starting off, you're running a campaign, right? Like on average is typically a three month campaign to start, or at least regardless of whether you work with us, if you were doing it yourself, I advocate like do a three month campaign. Make sure it's three months. Make sure you allocate.
enough budget to get a good sample size. Right. Right. So I think on average,
If you're one campaign and you look at it like you're going to get click through rates and signups potentially, depending on your budget, depending where you allocate the cash, the size of the influencer, loads of variables, right? But in general, you want to start off with a campaign. You want a good sample size. You want a good timeline.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (18:48)
Yeah.
Neill (18:53)
Understand you're playing the awareness game at that point. You're still going to get click through and you're still going to get kind of conversions. But I think a good KPI of like we spent X, we got Y. So good number, good piece of content, maybe up to 20 pieces of content, for example, across those three months.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (19:05)
Got it.
it.
I think very, very interesting and thank you for breaking that down for me, Neil. So if someone is starting off with Creator-led program because we understand the power that it holds, ⁓ how would you suggest they start off? ⁓ Say if a founder has just started thinking about CLG, where should they begin?
Neill (19:28)
Some of the mistakes that I would say immediately upfront versus where they should begin, some of the things that they should avoid
Too tight a timeline, too tight of a budget. But I've seen people like do that, not get the right quantifiable back, not have enough of a sample size and then they go in with like, oh, this doesn't work. So to say begin, I kind of already mentioned the three month campaign is a good kind of simple templated approach to do. You need a minimum of 30K. YouTube is expensive.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (19:54)
and I
love you.
Neill (19:57)
the creator
is going to eat your budget really quick. And if you have that appetite and certain creators are already profiling, they're bigger, you can expect to raise that budget significantly. you need to start, experiment from a budget and a campaign type. And what you realize you're doing is you're playing the awareness game in that instant.
Do not treat it like ads. let the creator create. And even if it doesn't like convert, like not everything is gonna convert.
So you need to do that first stage awareness campaign, understand it's experimental, make a good impression with creators, be creator friendly. impacts word of mouth is a very, very, very real thing in the YouTube community. You are in the partnership game, focus on a key KPI that you have control of, content output.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (20:41)
Bye now.
Yeah.
sure. Yeah.
Neill (20:48)
and for like 10 pieces or 20 pieces of content and also try to repurpose. think the last thing is try to kind of can you do cross platform per creator? Do they have a niche, which surprisingly they often do have a little niche newsletter, a little discord channel. They have a presence on Twitter or LinkedIn. Start kind of cross platforming that content by asking them. And even if you do a custom partnership with one or two ask,
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (20:49)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Thank
Neill (21:14)
an agreement for you to kind of reformat and repurpose that content so you can utilize it. That's really getting the most out of the three months. But step one, start.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (21:23)
Mm-hmm.
All right, thank you so much for breaking down the cradle and growth and how it's sort of defining DevTool marketing. I'm sure if someone who's just starting off with CLG is watching, they'll have a lot to learn. ⁓ And for everyone who's sort of listening, please check out plug.dev. And if you're building a DevTool, start thinking about who's actually telling a story for you.
Alright, thank you so much, Neil.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (00:00)
Hey everyone, today we're diving into one of the most interesting shifts in developer marketing, which is creator led growth. And if you also notice the rise of developer YouTubers, indie hackers, and community educators who are actually shaping adoption decisions, this conversation is for you. And to unpack this, today we have with us Neil Gernon, who's the founder of Plug.dev. It's a platform which helps DevTool companies connect with creators who truly influence how developers learn and buy.
Neill (00:06)
Thank
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (00:26)
So Neel, great to have you here. And before we dive in, we'd love to understand your journey and then what led you to start plug.dev and give us a bit of an overview about what plug.dev does.
Neill (00:27)
I'm
Sure, yeah. So we effectively, we're kind of known for influencer. Everyone goes like plug.dev influencers, we refer to ourselves as the creator platform for DevTools. So that means we effectively build and manage both creator programs and influencer programs, which I know we're gonna talk about later. on a daily, we're quite lucky that we get to work with
some of fastest growing dev tools in the world, and we're class growth operators like Suburbase or Clerk and Snyk, a whole lot more. And so that's always a cool part of our job. ⁓ But how we actually do it is maybe a little bit different. we essentially took the decision like really early on to
invest in the foundational assets that would help us do their job. so early on, we built a platform on which everything is delivered. I built the network and community before I the company. And so the platform sits on top of that kind of community, the large community of creators that code on the internet to our knowledge, which is useful when you've had extra problems, you can dip into Discord and like have chats.
You asked my background. So
I started in London in basically I was building developer communities for like 10 I started off in information security in London, ended back in Dublin, building an AI community both times, pretty successful,
And so it was always some way to like community focus for me. what I had actually noticed was it's kind of a typical dev rel problem of hard to articulate or quantify the value of your dev rel work or community work.
I ended up kind of overnight, running Dev influencer campaigns for companies like Post Hog, Didn't really know what I was doing. We're kind of learning what it was. fast forward, I ended up leaving company at some time. I was having a baby, doing some life stuff. And a little while later,
started plug to really double down and optimize for developer specific GTM with creators that code or this kind of category of like content and distribution in one that kind of in mind.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (02:40)
do you see a shift in how DevTools are going to market today? And is there more acceptance of creator led growth or was that always happening and we've just now defined the term.
Neill (02:50)
And yeah, there's of course changes. like AI SEO, AEO, GEO that's a headache for companies. but from from our perspective, perspective, a lot of the companies that we speak to, it's like
There was a lot of experimentation this year and people got a little more informed and are getting a bit more concrete going into next year, I think. And there's still the same kind of sentiment within the cloud. If you're asking the right questions, companies are still in search for distribution channels
So what I mean by that is like, do you have an open source community? Do you have a Discord channel?
So trying to look at those like the broad creators that code category is like distribution content, what can we do? And a lot of companies still ask what if we did this? There's a lot of experimentation, which I love. We geek out on, we think is really cool.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (03:25)
it.
Neill (03:31)
People are getting really creative with it to differentiate themselves. But then going back and realizing that even like just going in an influencer can do a lot of those things. You can create and scale content production. You can get that distribution partnerships.
Several audits have started kind of ranking higher with the content pieces, including like YouTube shorts and not just long form, So yeah, there's
A lot of change, a lot of questions, there's more experimentation. Still in search for distribution, still in search to iron out the headaches to enable them, scale the production of content, figure out AI. And we find a lot of people are ending up on the creator-led category because it can tick a lot of those boxes. That's our bias perspective, but that's what we see.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (04:03)
Mm-hmm.
No, I think that's fair. And I think in the age of AI, you need to do a lot of experiments and you need to stand out. Otherwise, you just get lost in the sea of content that is out there. So I think that's fair. And Neel, so in your perspective, why is creator-led growth, why does it work so well for developers? Is it because developers, by their nature, they want to learn, they want to understand new things, they're always looking out for content? What has been your perspective here?
Neill (04:18)
Yeah.
totally.
And I think a lot of companies are asking themselves, what are the resources we have? What is the fundamental facts of the resources we have? What is the fundamental facts about our ICP? And I know they realize, okay, right, this is the scenario. We're looking to marry these things, content distribution, our ICP is in these categories and in a route
to get to that ICP is partnering with these guys and you need a vehicle to do that. And so I think that was at least foundational for us over the past couple of years, but then I do think
with that there's been more experiments with that there's been more kind of knowledge sharing within within the community and there's been ⁓ there's been use cases shared and now just on the company side companies have realized that just on the influencer side it started to work for them
So it's like they're all in on understanding that like in this instant, in this Excel spreadsheet, what is the CPM rate and what is this transactional relationship between me and this get that content out Mr. Influencer. It has drifted more onto strategic longer term partnerships.
so I think that's just like,
that's just value they realize they can tick all the boxes it's been well documented companies like Clark and the guys over there really double down and optimized for YouTube
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (05:43)
Mm-hmm.
Neill (05:47)
the three or four key partners and then a backlog of other other influences and in their their high priority partner category are generating like 15,000 conversions per partner Because they double down and optimize and what they knew was kind of working.
is companies realizing they can get creative. They can do different things. It's not just, OK, YouTube, but we've grown our marketing activity. How can we support that? We want to go broader for our launch weeks.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (06:13)
Make sense. So lot of use cases, know, it's not just, you know, so what I'm understanding is that there's a shift between, dev tools actually saying and doing like one-off partnerships to actually a more deeper strategic engagement where they're looking at, ⁓ creators and partners for a longer time. And then there are multiple activities that they sort of able to engage them with. So whenever they're doing events, can they sort of amplify that voice? If they're going regional, can they amplify that voice? So I think a lot of use cases and definitely a lot of
of exciting stuff there. But I think, Neil, then one of the most important thing becomes that how should companies actually think about selecting creators? And especially balancing the brand fit and still giving creators freedom to make content that performs. How would they sort of run that to make sure that creators are true to their craft?
Neill (07:01)
Yeah, so there's a whole lot of variables in this. It sounds like a really simple question. There's so many variables based on like your campaign or program type and the purpose of the engagement. ⁓ Because, you know, sometimes it actually, you can be a lot, you can be looser with the ICP and like that creator is not on brand for us, but they still have value depending on what it is you're doing.
I mean, there's a couple of base fundamental bullet points of like, do they make content that already hits your ICP? Are they already servicing your ICP, your customer profile? Are they knowledgeable about the kind of the other tools that are complementary to yours? Maybe they're already building with those tools so you can like really fit in and compliment the kind of natural developer workflow or then you can be a tool within their stack of choice, right?
And could you see yourself fitting in there?
And that's really important.
I guess it shouldn't be surprising to me, like a little bit surprising to me that they know like one or two of their favorite creators. They're like, I really like this guy. Cause I think like we've had some CEOs come on and they're like, yeah, we're looking for like to hire DevRel. We want to hire these YouTubers. So they tend to know, they're lot more educated. They tend to know about like, know, YouTubers they like. And so that's like the brand fit. Also your team is a good indicator. They're to know your marketing or DevRel folks are going to know.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (08:22)
Okay.
Neill (08:23)
But then it does get looser outside of that. you've like, you know, if you're just quite simply within the React ecosystem and maybe within that you've a niche that is partner types, but on the fringes you've just complete, maybe creators that you wouldn't want to create a long form tutorial for you and stick it on your website. Maybe that wouldn't be enough, but you'd be like, you know, we can partner with you for like, maybe do some drop-ins, maybe like join one of our launches.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (08:35)
Mm-hmm.
Neill (08:52)
Or we're pushing out a webinar. Can you help us amplify this? Could you share it into your niche newsletter or something like that? I'd say those two categories of like, you're going to know who are your high profile strategic partners. Are they really aligned with your brand in terms of like little things the tone and the cadence of how they teach the clarity in what is their teaching and the quality of the production.
and then the type of things that they are building and the other tools that they are using that complements your tool. So that's one, that's how I look at strategic partnerships. Other than that, companies, you can get a little bit looser, can be really effective to produce like general awareness campaigns. We're trying to amplify launch weeks, make some noise. That's a kind of a different book. You can be a bit looser with your ICP.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (09:27)
Mm-hmm.
sense.
Makes sense. And I just got curious. when companies are collaborating with these partners, how rigid is their brief? Or is it decided between the company and the creator? Or does the company dictate that this is how you should create? How does that happen generally?
Neill (09:52)
Yeah, no, I mean, we always advocate for that creators create. They know their ICP, they know their audience better than you. it can depend. Right. But ultimately, like if we were to stand over like our default kind of approach.
We advocate for letting critics create, if you like their content, understand how you can fit in to their content versus try to kind of sabotage and think, hey, this is really compliment to us. Let's do a video and just like make sure everything is about our brand. We tend to see that, like for example, a dedicated video on YouTube or something, they don't convert as well. And they're still valuable. I'd still make an argument for them being valuable, depending on the stage of the company and what you're trying to do on YouTube. If you're trying to build up some.
actual authority on the platform early on some smaller or micro influencers to do dedicated videos can kind of stamp some nice authority on that where like you as long as that video which then the dev rel team and dev marketing team can get more involved and to try to guide and to collaborate much closer with the creator on what do we want to take here that might be for just the general direction of the video how authoritative
you can be by aligning with key problem statements, thinking about it from an SEO perspective and more. That's all valuable, right? So that's one category. But in general, we usually advocate for let creators create, you like the content, try to fit in to what they are already creating.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (11:03)
Okay.
Got it. And is that the difference between companies that truly succeed with CLG from the ones who are still experimenting or are there any other factors that sort of contribute to that?
Neill (11:27)
I think the commonality is that they acknowledge what it is they're doing from a marketing perspective in-house, then ⁓ what is their unique kind of angle, and then they're leveraging influencers.
to support that. So if you look at someone like Clark, they took a pretty opinionated approach on partnerships, did a lot of experimentation, and then they found this kind of angle to double down and optimize for these creators that can give them long tail.
and
videos that convert really well. But they really took the approach of like, what we want to do is we want to compliment the creator and the video is not about us and we want to integrate in here because we're going to be the odd solution and they're going to, the Creators is going to use all these other great tools,
Okay, we need to keep doing this I'm going to keep on track with actually being good partners something Nobody talks about big difference. Everyone's talking about like, you know Is this one video attributable? What is the CPM rates like every gets data driven which you should
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (12:19)
Yes.
Neill (12:27)
Community sentiment is real. Virality
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (12:27)
Yeah.
Neill (12:30)
within niche closed private creator Discord is a very real thing. I've unfortunately seen companies trend negatively and positively. And to talk as an example, my point being of a company that has done that, has got into trending in the private YouTube discourse channels that I know of. And if you've reached that point, you've done something really well. ⁓
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (12:41)
about it.
Neill (12:55)
I think other companies as well, Snake, perfect example of, they have an in-house growing and marketing activity, they use creators for that. They know what they have internally, they want to amplify that. And they use creators per launch. Constant cadence every quarter, every maybe two months. They have a new thing, they have a webinar, they have a hackathon, they have a launch, they have a feature kind of that they want to push. And they use creators to amplify that.
bit more social, a bit more on Twitter, a bit more on LinkedIn, then goes into YouTube and kind of breadcrumbs as we call it in influencer playbook. And companies like SuppaBase, they want to amplify the two sides. They have like a creative program. have a big kind of creator, excuse me, not even a creator, they have a large community. They're open sourcing and discord community. And really what they're
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (13:31)
on it.
Mm-hmm.
Neill (13:53)
you know, that's an amazing asset for their launch week. So it's just so well known for it. They want to utilize that and gather the community around that, turn the community into creators, essentially. And then off the back of that, YouTube is a much maybe a bit more strategic outbound where they can also support activities like their conferences ⁓ that they had, that they have launched a little while ago.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (14:05)
Okay.
Neill (14:22)
So yeah, really depends, but acknowledge what you have internally and see what creators and influencers can support.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (14:32)
Understood. And these companies like Snyk and SuperBase, very interesting examples. So when they work with creators on a perennial basis, so you said that Snyk has a lot of internal hackathons, a lot of webinars, which they sort of amplify using these creators. So are these creators sort of fixed that, you know, now I'll work with these creators because I've seen them perform? Or do they keep experimenting and trying out new creators? How is that structured?
Neill (14:55)
best programs always continuously experiment. Even if you have, even if you're in at the phase of doubling down and optimizing for a thing, You still need to experiment to find more of the thing that's working, and number one, but also two, don't lean
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (15:08)
Yeah.
Neill (15:12)
on the presumption that like that is the the optimal thing if you're constraining yourself by doing more things. And what I mean by that is there is more companies getting more creative with influencer, as I said. So if you have one thing that's working, maybe that's fine. But again, if you go back to acknowledge what you have internally, what else can you utilize these creators for? Then that's where it gets interesting. Ultimately, this is like the whole kind of story that we advocate.
on creator led growth is to marry the inbound and outbound. Your outbound strategic partnerships with creators that you're targeting, but also you're in the house. So you want inbound creators. And that is like, for example, like Supabase right? Like your Neon has a creative program, Clerk has a creative program. What you want to make sure is that even if you're doing YouTube, which is outbound, you want to make sure that you have an open door policy.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (15:47)
Makes sense.
Neill (16:08)
for the creator community to come knock on your door and initiate a value exchange. In exchange for content, you give me X, could be cash, could be merch, could be premium access, could be any of those things. But that's the equivalent of like when companies, for us, when we look at that, companies don't have a creator program, you effectively have like your ICP coming to your website, they're signing up. But what if somebody
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (16:14)
Thanks.
Mm-hmm.
Neill (16:32)
a developer that's signing up to your website, but they happen to have an audience or can create content and you're not acknowledging or identifying that you're missing out on on serious value of having like turning the user into a creator and advocate for your brand. So the ultimate leverage is really to get the inbound and outbound motion of truly putting creator led growth into action, going out and getting strategic partnerships.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (16:45)
them.
Okay.
Neill (16:57)
incentivizing your community, your discord community, your open source community, whatever the case may be, or just like have that creative program listed on your website to check it out because you're doing more content. So if you have a creative program that is a value proposition to them.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (17:05)
Thanks.
Neill (17:10)
then suddenly you can catch a category of developer who may already be creating content about your brand and you just want to capture that and go, hey, that's awesome. In support of your work of creating content when you mention us, great, we're going to do a value exchange. We'll give you something back. When you start doing those two side by side, inbend and outbend motion, that's the kind of full flow that we talk about of kind creator led growth optimally being kind of in motion.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (17:18)
Makes sense.
Yeah, and I think that can be so powerful because this is almost very organic, right? Because this is your ICP, this is your community which really likes you, which has been using you. And if they are going out and if they are creating content, I think that can be the most authentic content. Because that's something that sort of comes from their experience. I think that's so powerful.
Very interesting and I think that's a great breakdown. But Neel, how do you then sort of for every GTM team, know, running any program, they need to understand what is it that they'll get out of it and what are some of the metrics that they should track. So with CLG, what do you feel are some of the metrics that really sort of move and how long does it typically take to see meaningful impact?
Neill (18:19)
you're starting off, you're running a campaign, right? Like on average is typically a three month campaign to start, or at least regardless of whether you work with us, if you were doing it yourself, I advocate like do a three month campaign. Make sure it's three months. Make sure you allocate.
enough budget to get a good sample size. Right. Right. So I think on average,
If you're one campaign and you look at it like you're going to get click through rates and signups potentially, depending on your budget, depending where you allocate the cash, the size of the influencer, loads of variables, right? But in general, you want to start off with a campaign. You want a good sample size. You want a good timeline.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (18:48)
Yeah.
Neill (18:53)
Understand you're playing the awareness game at that point. You're still going to get click through and you're still going to get kind of conversions. But I think a good KPI of like we spent X, we got Y. So good number, good piece of content, maybe up to 20 pieces of content, for example, across those three months.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (19:05)
Got it.
it.
I think very, very interesting and thank you for breaking that down for me, Neil. So if someone is starting off with Creator-led program because we understand the power that it holds, ⁓ how would you suggest they start off? ⁓ Say if a founder has just started thinking about CLG, where should they begin?
Neill (19:28)
Some of the mistakes that I would say immediately upfront versus where they should begin, some of the things that they should avoid
Too tight a timeline, too tight of a budget. But I've seen people like do that, not get the right quantifiable back, not have enough of a sample size and then they go in with like, oh, this doesn't work. So to say begin, I kind of already mentioned the three month campaign is a good kind of simple templated approach to do. You need a minimum of 30K. YouTube is expensive.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (19:54)
and I
love you.
Neill (19:57)
the creator
is going to eat your budget really quick. And if you have that appetite and certain creators are already profiling, they're bigger, you can expect to raise that budget significantly. you need to start, experiment from a budget and a campaign type. And what you realize you're doing is you're playing the awareness game in that instant.
Do not treat it like ads. let the creator create. And even if it doesn't like convert, like not everything is gonna convert.
So you need to do that first stage awareness campaign, understand it's experimental, make a good impression with creators, be creator friendly. impacts word of mouth is a very, very, very real thing in the YouTube community. You are in the partnership game, focus on a key KPI that you have control of, content output.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (20:41)
Bye now.
Yeah.
sure. Yeah.
Neill (20:48)
and for like 10 pieces or 20 pieces of content and also try to repurpose. think the last thing is try to kind of can you do cross platform per creator? Do they have a niche, which surprisingly they often do have a little niche newsletter, a little discord channel. They have a presence on Twitter or LinkedIn. Start kind of cross platforming that content by asking them. And even if you do a custom partnership with one or two ask,
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (20:49)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Thank
Neill (21:14)
an agreement for you to kind of reformat and repurpose that content so you can utilize it. That's really getting the most out of the three months. But step one, start.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (21:23)
Mm-hmm.
All right, thank you so much for breaking down the cradle and growth and how it's sort of defining DevTool marketing. I'm sure if someone who's just starting off with CLG is watching, they'll have a lot to learn. ⁓ And for everyone who's sort of listening, please check out plug.dev. And if you're building a DevTool, start thinking about who's actually telling a story for you.
Alright, thank you so much, Neil.
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