The value of attending conferences

Ted Neward: In some sense, it's the same as asking, "How does marketing get their budget?" People understand intuitively that brand recognition is an important thing.

As a non-developer-product company, we have an API, but we don't have that direct connection. Coca-Cola is considered to be the number one most recognized brand in the world and yet it spends billions of dollars every year to stay that way. Part of it is this notion of locality of reference inside your brain. If you've just seen a Coca-Cola commercial, you say, "Oh, yeah! Coca-Cola! I want one of those!" It's that idea of keeping it fresh.

For Smartsheet in particular (and I think this is true of Netflix, Ford, and, again, all of these other companies that are being told repeatedly that they need to go and build APIs), we have to justify internally why we need to create these APIs. The CEO, the chief financial officer (CFO), and the vice president (VP) of marketing don't see why we need to build APIs.

Why does Netflix have such a huge open-source presence? Why is Netflix putting all this effort into open source? Yeah, it gets some bug fixes, but at the same time, developers recognize Netflix as being number one. It becomes a place where the cool kids hang out, so that nets the company a lot of developer mojo.

Any other business that wants to integrate with Netflix already knows a great deal about it. If Netflix wanted to go and cut a deal with, say, Domino's Pizza, then when you fire up Netflix, you could also get a message saying, "Hey! Do you want to order a Domino's pizza? As a special deal, we'll deliver it straight to your house." Netflix knows where you live and Domino's knows what kind of pizza you want.

That ecosystem doesn't happen unless developers are involved, but that doesn't happen unless there are people from Netflix going out to the developers and saying, "Do you want to do this? Here's all these reasons why you should and here's all these resources that enable that." That is the natural progression. As each company builds an API, they not only need people to maintain it, but also people to promote it and tell people how to use it.

Geertjan Wielenga: But what's the reason that you see such a strong distinction between developer advocates who come from organizations that are talking about code and tech versus those that are talking about APIs?

Ted Neward: Oh, it's not so much a distinction between the individuals doing it as much as it is about the companies at which it's done.

If you want to use the API for Smartsheet, you actually don't have to download the product; we're all cloud-based to begin with. We have software development kits (SDKs), but they just wrap our API endpoints, so there is nothing, as a developer, that you need to download.

More importantly, our success isn't in getting developers to use Smartsheet: our success is when my VP of enterprise sales walks into Oracle and says, "Hey! You guys really want to buy some Smartsheet."

The Oracle CEO then says, "This looks good. We should buy some of this."

Next, the VP of IT says, "Wait a minute. I've seen too many of these no-code tools where data just goes to die. I have no faith." The alternative is that the VP of IT goes, "Some of my guys have been talking about how they keep seeing these Smartsheet guys at conferences, so I have some faith." There's that brand recognition.

My target audience, in some respects, isn't where I'm aiming: I'm aiming at the developers of these IT companies. I'm not aiming at the actual person who's writing the check, because there's a connection that needs to happen. That's really what a lot of this non-developer company developer relations stuff is about.

Imagine, for a moment, if we convinced Domino's to spin up APIs. Domino's doesn't even realize what a huge market it could have if it created a partnership with Meetup. Every time you wanted to schedule a meetup, you could automatically enable a web-hook automation to have pizza delivered to the meetup building.

But the developer who would build that is not the direct consumer of Meetup and they're not the direct consumer of Domino's, except that they happen to be a human being that will occasionally consume both.

That's what I mean when I say that when you're Oracle or when you're ThoughtWorks, your developer advocates are marketing directly to the people who buy your stuff; there's a causal link. When you're Smartsheet, or many of these other companies, it's more this indirect mechanism, which means, unfortunately, that it's hard to prove your success.

There's a certain amount of faith that has to happen on the part of the company. When I came in a year and a half ago, Smartsheet had no developer relations department. I had to meet with the VP of technology and the chief technology officer (CTO). I had to meet with a number of people across the company to convince them. I had to say, "No, really, you guys need this."