The Business Value of Developer Relations: How and Why Technical Communities Are Key To Your Success

by Mary Thengvall

Again, although starting a meetup for your product can seem like a great way to build a presence in the greater developer community, I’d caution against it for a few reasons:6 A meetup hosted by a company about its (usually proprietary) product is easily called out by developers as a sales tactic. Finding speakers for a monthly meetup whose theme is your proprietary product (unless you’re a fully open source company) can be difficult. It can also drain not only company resources but any goodwill you’ve built up with the community. Even if you do have an open source product, limiting your meetup to customers and prospects limits your audience and keeps people from learning from others outside their immediate purview, which is often what people come to meetups to do. If there are already-established meetups talking about similar topics and bringing in a similar group of people to the one you’re trying to start, you’re actively detracting from the organic community efforts already happening in your audience segment.