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
2. Developers hit walls. exception missing doc out of date unsupported bad use case
3. Developers need to start conversations.
4. Conversations at scale? Build a community.
5. What is delivered? Community Support What is promised?
6. Good luck on the internet! Community support does not mean...
7. Ask on StackOverflow Community support does not mean...
8. API support is not just about programming.
9. Hosting your own docs? Host your own conversations!
10. The owner-occupied community forum.
11. What happens in email support stays in email support. Which is bad.
12. https://discourse.algolia.com/tags/wordpress 88 topics 400+ posts WordPress tag activity after 6 months
13. What % of questions are answered by community members? Key API Community Support KPI
14. Algolia Community Tech Stack
16. Crossing the API community support chasm few : many many : many
17. To go from few : many to some : many ...start with your company.
18. At Algolia, employees join the forum during onboarding. Meet our community! https://alg.li/intros
19. Custom Discourse <> Slack integration
20. Read event summaries! https://alg.li/events
21. To go from some : many to many : many ...you’ll need to do outreach.
22. Build an outreach toolkit. Templates “Can you help…”
23. Search “jane portland javascript” Build an outreach toolkit.
24. Incentives “Thank you!” Build an outreach toolkit. Get swag! https://alg.li/represent
25. Right person Right time Right incentive Three keys to successful outreach
26. Josh Dzielak Thank you! Developer Advocate, Algolia DevXCon · 5/22/2017 Questions? — josh@algolia.com @dzello dzello