Understand the full developer journey - even before they sign up

We’ve all heard the term “awareness”. It’s the first step in any customer journey. With crowd.dev you can uncover the first time developers engage with your community, and inform your go-to-market team of every action they took. This includes where they’ve worked, what open-source projects they have contributed to, and how they have engaged in your ecosystem.

Uncovering these insights is valuable and can help you to:

1. Find ideal developers and organizations in your ecosystem to share with your sales team.
2. Optimize your user acquisition strategy to reduce your cost to acquire a user.
3. Drive product development with more detailed developer journey insights.
4. Identify trends in the developer journey to create educational content that informs and supports prospective developers.

For commercial open source companies, understanding the full developer journey is not just beneficial. It's essential. In this blog, you will learn how to do just that. Check out our short video tutorial or simply read on below for the step-by-step.

1. Connect data sources

If you haven’t used crowd.dev yet, the first thing you have to do is connect your data sources. This will help us give you a unified view of your developer community - including what everyone is talking about. crowd.dev has various built-in integrations, including GitHub, Slack, Discord, Stack Overflow, Reddit, and many others. You can find step-by-step instructions for every data source here.‍

2. How to filter and find contacts

Next we will find power users in your ecosystem and understand their developer journey. To do this we need to navigate to the “Contacts” page by selecting “Contacts”. On this page, you can toggle the top menu to see different segments of contacts, like “new and active” or “most engaged”. We will stay on the “All contacts” section and combine filters to find relevant contacts for our sales team. One segment of users that’s particularly interesting is senior developers. They have influence on purchase decisions and could indicate strong appetite from the company they work at to integrate your software. 

To do this, click “Filters” in the top right corner. We can either scroll or search. We want to select “Seniority Level”, then click on the filter and enter the keyword “senior”. Now I have a view of all the senior developers in the community. We want to see which ones have actively engaged with your open-source project by forking our GitHub repo. To do this we click on “Filters” and select “Activity type”, and then click on “Forked”. Now you have a full view of all the senior developers in your open-source community that have also forked your Github repo. If you notice a trend of these developers at a specific organization, it’s a good sign that the organization will be receptive to your sales efforts.

‍3. Uncover the developer journey

Now that you have a good list of users, you can click on a contact and view their profile. Under activity, you can see all of the actions taken by them. This is where you can see the users first trackable touch point with your open-source company, and how they have engaged in your community and with your product from that day onwards.

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If they are a good fit, you can tag them as a sales prospect and share this data and history with your sales team, arming them with all the information they need. This can either be done manually or by using our Hubspot integration which allows you to sync your crowd.dev account with Hubspot.

4. Use cases for this data

You can use all of this data to understand your developer journey. Giving you insight into when developers will need certain content or tools to be successful. 

Other use cases include sharing high-intent prospects with your sales team. Or, with different sets of filters you can uncover a variety of personas in your community. Like identifying contributors that you can share with your DevRel team to reward and support them, or discovering potential candidates to hire and share with your People team.

Wrapping up

There are a lot of benefits to understanding the full user journey and empowering your sales team with that additional insight. Ultimately, it can help increase the quality of your pipeline, product and community. 

If you would like to learn more about how crowd.dev can benefit you and your go-to-market team, book a call with us here.

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