How do you convince your business leaders that your programs to engage and excite developers are good for business?
This talk will analyze case studies on three successful developer engagement programs: packaged licensed software, open source development framework, and infrastructure as a service. Each of these different business models has a different way to measure the value of a developer. Understanding what this value is and how it is computed is essential for securing funding for the developer programs you want to build.
19. Spring Community Population (Open Source)
User base: 2,500,000
Key Ratios
Core:Expert 20:1
Forum:Registered 10:1
Registered:Global 20:1
Global Population
Registered
Forum
Experts
Core
Active: 12,000
Committers: 20
Population
20x
30x
20x
Subscribers: 125,000
Answers: 400
10x
User base: 2,500,000
20. Application
Management
Middleware /
App Server Platform
Frameworks
and Tools
Hyperictc ServerSpring & Grails
ManageRunBuild
SpringSource Solution:
Modern Platform for Business Critical Applications
21. Spring Community Population (Open Source)
User base: 2,500,000
Key Ratios
Core:Expert 20:1
Forum:Registered 10:1
Registered:Global 20:1
Global Population
Registered
Forum
Experts
Core
Active: 12,000
Committers: 20
Population
20x
30x
20x
Subscribers: 125,000
Answers: 400
10x
User base: 2,500,000
22. Raw Leads: valid contact information, but
have not been assigned to an AE.
Open Leads: “Assigned Leads”have not
yet been contacted by an AE.
Raw Leads
Open Leads
In Process
Working
OPPTY
In Process Leads: AE's are attempting to
make contact via email and phone
calls.
Working Leads: The lead responded to
an email or a conversation has taken
place..
Opportunites: AE was able to determine
that there is a real project with a real
budget and a project will take place in
the next 3-months.
AssignedLeads
Community
$
5%
25%
30%
30%
20%
Key Conversions
Community-to-Raw: 5%
Raw-to-Open: 25%
Open-to-Working: 30%
Working-to-Opty: 30%
Opty-to-Close: 20%
I’ll spare you the existential version of this question.
Started in technology at BEA Systems doing some evangelism and eventually running their Dev2Dev program.
Joined SpringSource to help Adrian Colyer and Rod Johnson build a powerful open source community of Java developers
Acquired by VMware and worked with the Groovy/Grails and RabbitMQ communities
Built the Developer Relations team for Cloud Foundry while at VMware and Pivotal
Joined AWS in 2013 to run technical evangelism and community building
Who has made a code commit in the past month?
Who has grepped something?
Who has curled an endpoint? – no that isn’t a Portland microbrew so
Who has written some code in Haskell?
Do you sell traditional packaged licensed software?
Screw you and your corporate capitalist hierarchies!
Software is a meritocracy and ideas need to be free!
If you have “blank-as-a-service” in your company description anywhere, you are in this group.
Regardless of your job or your company’s business model, you are a cost center!
Someone is paying for your salary
Who pays the bill? Ultimately your customers do.
You are in developer marketing, so presumably your target audience is developers
That means you have to work out
Your customers do.
You are in developer marketing, so presumably your target audience is developers
What is a developer worth to your business? What does it mean
So let’s take a look at packaged software
In particular, the Windows OS in the 1990s.
Name drop: Charles FitzGerald, Todd Nielsen
For Microsoft in the late 90s, every developer seat was estimated to produce and average of 7 additional sales of Windows OS.
Microsoft knew the marginal cost of production for each licensed issued, and hence the marginal value (net profit) for each license
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) was set at a fraction of the marginal value
Screw you and your corporate capitalist hierarchies!
Software is a meritocracy and ideas need to be free!
Open source Java Dependency Injection framework
What does one developer mean to my company’s business?
SpringSource went through a couple of different business models
- support, developer subscriptions, special features, IDE sales
Eventually settled on selling…
Gave away the developer tools
Sold a production ready version of Tomcat to WebLogic and Websphere shops
Integrated it with a production monitoring and management solution
So what was one developer worth to SpringSource business?
Almost nothing. Its was the lead flow into selling the run time
Did a
CCR*CRO*COW*CWO*COC*avgD$
CCR = Conversion Rate Community member to raw lead
CRO = Conversion Rate raw lead to open lead
COW = Conversion Rate open lead to working lead
CWO = Conversion Rate working lead to opportunity
COC = Conversion Rate opportunity to closed deal
avgD$ = Average Deal size
If you have “blank-as-a-service” in your company description anywhere, you are in this group.
For a lot of these as-a-service companies a developer is revenue stream
Need to understand what that customer is worth
Time Series Analysis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_series
Understand your execution costs and the price you plan to charge for your service
Build a revenue model and collect data (one year minimum for monthly charges, one quarter for weekly)
Discard your outliers (free tier and big spenders)
Check for stationary or seasonal behavior
Construct an appropriate ARIMA model (Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average)
Forecast yearly/quarterly revenue based on this model
Project Customer Lifetime Value over a time window you care about
Set your developer acquisition budget per developer to be fractional component (20-40%) of your CLV
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoregressive_integrated_moving_average
[2] http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/pmc/section4/pmc4.htm
Set your developer acquisition budget per developer to be fractional component (20-40%) of your CLV
How to make sure the CEO funds your crazy ideas to make developers happy