How to Market Your API Platform to Developers During a Recession

With the recent downturn on public stock markets due to COVID-19, a recession or depression is almost inevitable. It’s likely we see mass failures across retail, travel, entertainment, and other industry sectors. The spillover from coronavirus disease and the following shelter-in-place can have drastic consequences in the startup world. Small brick and mortar businesses that were shuttered due to shelter-in-place rules will no longer are spending money on Facebook or Yelp to promote their business nor will they maintain their SaaS subscriptions. Large enterprises will pull back spending in sales and marketing in anticipation of a recession. This could cause reduction in seat counts or usage for SaaS contract.s Similarly, sales teams may find CFOs and financial controllers are blocking many more purchases than before forcing deals to be stuck in procurement or legal review.

The good news is that many developer platforms and APIs have tricks that make them more resilient to a recession. However, if you’re not doing these items today, now is the time to reconsider to ensure the longevity of your product and/pr company.

What is Developer Relations and What are Common Roles?

Developer Relations is not simply a role or department at API-first companies. Developer relations is a mindset of getting developers adopt a platform and making them successful with their initiatives rather than attempting to sell to those developers. This makes developer relations different from traditional sales and marketing roles. However, if you ask “What is Developer Relations?”, you may get many ambiguous responses as developer relations is a catch all phrase for a variety of different roles and titles. Some titles include “Developer Advocate” and Developer Evangelist”, but can also include other newer titles like “Developer Experience Manager.”These roles vary company to company and even across teams within a company.

This post outlines some of the different roles within devrel, such as: