From few to some to many — How to scale community support for APIs

The free tier of many APIs includes “community support”. What does that mean exactly? How involved does the company need to be for community support to be effective, and how should that evolve over time? Drawing on 4 years of experience building developer communities at Keen IO and Algolia, I will discuss the role that conversations plan in developer experience, and show how to create a community support program that gets people talking.

Transcript

1. Josh Dzielak
   From few to some to many —
   How to scale community support for APIs
   Developer Advocate, Algolia
   DevXCon · May 22, 2017 · San Francisco
   @dzello
   dzello
   

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2. Developers hit walls.
   exception
   missing doc
   out of date
   unsupported
   bad use case
   

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3. Developers need to
   start conversations.
   

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4. Conversations at scale?
   Build a community.
   

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5. What is
   delivered?
   Community Support
   What is
   promised?
   

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6. Good luck on
   the internet!
   Community support does not mean...
   

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7. Ask on
   StackOverflow
   Community support does not mean...
   

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8. API support is not just
   about programming.
   

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9. Hosting your
   own docs?
   Host your own
   conversations!
   

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10. The owner-occupied
    community forum.
    

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11. What happens in email support
    stays in email support.
    Which is bad.
    

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12. https://discourse.algolia.com/tags/wordpress
    88 topics 400+ posts
    WordPress tag activity after 6 months
    

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13. What % of
    questions are
    answered by
    community
    members?
    Key API Community Support KPI
    

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14. Algolia Community Tech Stack
    

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16. Crossing the API
    community support chasm
    few : many many : many
    

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17. To go from
    few : many
    to
    some : many
    ...start with
    your company.
    

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18. At Algolia,
    employees join
    the forum during
    onboarding.
    Meet our community! https://alg.li/intros
    

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19. Custom Discourse <> Slack integration
    

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20. Read event summaries! https://alg.li/events
    

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21. To go from
    some : many
    to
    many : many
    ...you’ll need to
    do outreach.
    

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22. Build an outreach toolkit.
    Templates
    “Can you help…”
    

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23. Search
    “jane portland javascript”
    Build an outreach toolkit.
    

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24. Incentives
    “Thank you!”
    Build an outreach toolkit.
    Get swag! https://alg.li/represent
    

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25. Right person
    Right time
    Right incentive
    Three keys to
    successful outreach
    

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26. Josh Dzielak
    Thank you!
    Developer Advocate, Algolia
    DevXCon · 5/22/2017
    Questions? — josh@algolia.com
    @dzello
    dzello
    

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