DevRelCon's founder Matthew Revell spoke to Fireside with Voxgig
His commitment to community came through loud and clear in 2019. DevRelCon Prague shows his formula was strong enough to survive the pandemic.
With DevRelCon Prague kicking off next week, we chose to republish our 2019 podcast chat with Hoopy founder and the driving force behind DevRelCon, Matthew Revell. Matthew sat down with Orla Shanaghy to describe his history and tips for event speaking and the genesis of his successful DevRelCon series of events.
This excerpt demonstrates Matthew’s commitment to both developer relations and community:
Matthew Revell: What I realized was, my passion was about developer relations, but I felt there wasn't at the time much being written or said about developer relations that was really something that I could learn from as a practitioner.
So, I thought, well, I'll bring the experts to me, and hopefully get some other people to come along as well. And it was in a co-working space above a supermarket in Shoreditch, so it was fairly low key. Full budget for the – I say our; it was me. I had a couple of friends helping out.
But the budget was no more than £10,000 for the day. But we had people coming from America, from Japan, right across Europe. And there was only 100 or so of us there, but it was the start of something. And it seemed very clear that we were – as a community, we needed something to come together, dev rel practitioners. And then someone in San Francisco got in touch, who's now a friend, Tom (Onakaura) and said, "Hey, I saw this thing you did. Do you want to do it in San Francisco?" So, we collaborated on that.
And then a guy who came from Japan went to that one as well, and we had a conversation and was like, "Hey, we should do it in Tokyo as well." I said, "Yeah, let's do that." So, that happened. And then someone from China got in touch and said "We'd like to run this in China," so I was like, "Yeah, okay, let's do that." And it's been fairly – you know, I haven't gone out and sought to create a series of events, but it's grown organically.
I made a decision very early on that DevRelCon should be a community events. Because as someone working in a role that led to me sponsoring lots of events, I could recognize the events that people really cared about and that gave us a return on that sponsorship, versus those that were run purely for the money. And some events were nicer to deal with than others.
So, I tried to keep sponsorships low and ticket prices very low, to the point where I ended up making a loss on the events. Someone then said to me, "This is silly. You need to actually put enough margin into this to turn it into something self-sustaining. I was like, "Yeah, okay, I think I've learnt that now." So, last year, for the first time in London, we had an events manager. And now, there's enough budget in it that there's a team of us now who are running the events.
You can listen to the full conversation in episode 73 of the Fireside with Voxgig podcast.
Reinforcing the community theme, this piece from Ayu Adiati on what makes you stay in a community is great. Sounds so simple - support & appreciation! But these values take a commitment from the start and constant effort and buy in from community leadership to become embedded behaviours.
Next week we’ll be announcing another DevRel event a little closer to home, so I’m looking forward to sharing the details with you! Thanks for reading.