Onboarding, SDKs, clients, collections, support, community, and everything that happens between landing and first call.
Be predictable, be transparent about pricing and limits and status, communicate change early, honor deprecation commitments, and do not compete with the people building on you.
Ask them directly, make the channels visible and machine-readable, and — most importantly — visibly act on what you hear. A feedback loop where nothing ever changes stops receiving feedback.
Fix the causes rather than scaling the answering — better errors, better onboarding, documented edge cases, and public answers that search can find. Then treat support as a signal about your design.
Generate them from your OpenAPI for the two or three languages your consumers actually use, and only hand-craft where the generated experience is genuinely bad. A good OpenAPI and good docs beat six neglected SDKs.
Offer enough free access for someone to evaluate you properly without talking to anyone. Whether it stays free forever is a business decision; whether evaluation is self-service is not.
Carrying a message you believe in to people who have not heard it, patiently and repeatedly, until they can act on it. It is mostly storytelling, and it is as much internal as external.
DevRel is the function that owns the relationship between a company and the developers on its platform. You need the work — support, content, feedback, advocacy — long before you need a department.
The fewest possible steps between landing and a successful call. Self-service signup, an immediate key, a runnable example, and no application registration for people who only want their own data.
Because nothing about an API is self-evident. The story is what connects a technical capability to something a specific person cares about — and without it, good APIs go unused.
