Category Archives: Startups

Mar 25 2013
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10gen, Recruiting, Startups

Doers and Strategizers

In a recent BetaBeat article, Kevin Ryan talked about the challenges of hiring a new CEO at Gilt Groupe:

Another factor in Ms. Peluso’s appointment was her experience with different sized companies. “Here’s a hard thing when you look for someone in this spot. You want someone who has entrepreneurial energy and focus and moves quickly. At the same time, we’re not a 20-person company, we’re a 1,000-person company and with global operations. So you need to have that big company structure and thought process, but not slow you down–and that’s a weird hybrid,” he said. “I’ve interviewed people from big companies and I’m like: Oh my god, they’re going to be a disaster here. They’re gonna wanna take too long on everything. And yet people can be too sloppy if they just come from startups.”

While I’ve never had to hire a CEO, I can relate to the challenge that Kevin faces in hiring at a fast-growing startup. Finding the right mix of strategy and execution is a major challenge when you are recruiting.

For example, right now I’m actively trying to find someone to head our demand generation efforts. Ideally we will find someone who has the creativity to come up with ideas for campaigns to drive new leads and the analytical mindset to figure out which programs are the most successful. That requires a strategic person, who probably has many years of experience and can see the big picture.

At the same time, we’re still a small team. This person will also need to know how to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty, setting up programs in our marketing automation tool (Marketo), running reports to see which campaigns were successful, and all of the other details that go along with bootstrapping our enterprise marketing programs.

Personally, I love both aspects of my job and it’s one of the things that makes working at a startup so rewarding. Hopefully I can find someone that is up to the challenge!

Aug 26 2012
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10gen, Management, Productivity, Scaling, Startups

Every startup employee is an entrepreneur

At a startup, every employee needs to think of themselves as an entrepreneur in their business area. With constant growth, an individual’s role may morph over time as the work increases in both volume and complexity, and every employee must be prepared to think about how they will scale out their portion of the business. In my case, I made the transition from an individual contributor (and only marketing employee) to Director of Community Marketing. Every day I am learning new things about building marketing programs, and I’ve found that having an entrepreneurial mindset is one of the critical ingredients for success.

When I joined 10gen in December 2009, I was a “doer” completely focused on tactical activities. For almost a year, I managed all of our marketing programs by myself, including interacting with community members, coordinating meetups, mailing swag to contributors, organizing conferences, facilitating technical posts on the blog, running our newsletter, managing our CRM tools, and more.

As the company has grown, it’s become impossible for me to continue to do everything myself. Not only has the volume of activities exploded, but the standards of quality have risen and complexity increased. A simple example of this is our newsletter. Two and a half years ago when I started the newsletter, it was a single list with a few thousand names, all of which received the same email blast. Today, we have tens of thousands of subscribers, we issue over a dozen versions of the newsletter segmented by geography and interest, and we translate it into several languages.

Moving from a tactical to a more strategic role means that I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to scale our activities by creating processes and systems. Given the complexity of the newsletter and the number of subscribers, we couldn’t rely on an ad hoc mailing every month. We had to build and document a process for developing content and rules for segmenting lists, all while staying on a strict schedule to ensure that we have sufficient lead time to translate content and run tests. Similarly, for our MongoDB conferences, we built extensive documentation, checklists, budgeting templates, and speaker feedback processes to start to “templatize” our events. While each MongoDB conference brings a unique set of speakers and attendees together, from a logistical standpoint the process is repeatable so that we can execute dozens of these events every year.

I recently finished a book called The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, which strongly resonated with me. The book explains that many small businesses fail because each business owner has three competing personalities: the Technician, the Entrepreneur, and the Manager. The Technician is the skilled individual contributor, such as a software engineer or baker or in my case, marketer. The Entrepreneur is the person who becomes excited by new ideas, who sees what might be possible. The Manager strives to find order in the chaos, to maintain the status quo. When I joined 10gen, I was the quintessential Technician. In order to build a successful marketing team, I had to balance the Technician inside of me with an Entrepreneur, who could see the possibilities of an organized, well-run marketing machine, and a Manager that could maintain structure and process.

In the E-Myth book, the author explains that in order to build a successful business, you need to stop thinking about the item that you are producing – for example, the newsletter or a MongoDB conference – and start thinking about the overall process. With a structured process, your customers get a consistent, positive experience. Once you’ve documented the process you become freed from the tactical work and can focus on the next innovative strategy.

We don’t have systems for everything, but it’s something that (I hope!) I can motivate the whole team to build. In this way, everyone on my team gets to be an entrepreneur building a certain aspect of the business: Melia building our conferences, Meg building our email marketing and online events, Francesca and James building our user groups, Justin building our web infrastructure, Katie building our design / branding, and so on. This is challenging work but it’s what makes working at a startup so much fun!

Special thanks to Andrew Erlichson for recommending the E-Myth book!

Aug 15 2012
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10gen, NYC, Startups

Mayor Mike Bloomberg Visits 10gen

Today 10gen hosted New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg for a meet-and-greet with the staff. He arrived around noon, where our founders, Dwight and Eliot, greeted him at the elevator. Our President’s three kids were at the office and gave the Mayor a high five as he entered the office.

The founders walked the mayor around the office, explaining the importance of MongoDB as a technology and discussing 10gen’s expansion in New York City and beyond. The founders chatted with the mayor in a conference room while the rest of the staff gathered in the center of the office. We had our “virtual water cooler” running during the visit so that staff in our Palo Alto, London, Dublin, and Sydney offices could participate.

With a MongoDB coffee mug in his hand, the mayor emerged from his meeting with the founders to address the staff, talking about his experiences as an entrepreneur building technology for financial services companies. He spoke candidly for 10-15 minutes and then answered questions from the 10gen team for another 30 minutes on everything from politics to technology to his favorite restaurant in New York City!

Taking on an entrenched competitor like Oracle is a big challenge, and many are surprised that 10gen is doing it from New York City. My colleague Gary asked the mayor how 10gen fit into the city’s initiatives to support technology in the city, and the mayor responded by saying that “business begets business.” I hope that as other entrepreneurs see 10gen building a successful company here, New York City will be perceived as a viable place for starting pure technology companies.

To wrap up, here are some of my favorite tweets from the event:

The mayor has been incredibly supportive of the technology community in New York City, and I’m extremely grateful that he made the time to visit our team. The energy in the startup community is amazing, and outreach like today’s visit helps build on that momentum.

Thanks again to Mayor Mike Bloomberg for visiting, and for the team at the mayor’s office that helped arrange this amazing event!

Aug 08 2012
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Marketing, Open Source, Sales, Startups

Open Source Business Part 1: Benefits of Open Source

MongoDB users frequently ask me how 10gen and other open source companies make money. I thought that I’d share a bit about how open source businesses work in a series of blog posts. The series will be broken into roughly three parts:

  1. Benefits of the open source model
  2. Ways to monetize open source
  3. How to build an effective sales and marketing machine

In this post, I’ll address the benefits of building a company around open source software.

Adoption

Making your product free is an excellent marketing strategy. In many ways, the open source model is a version of the “freemium” model that companies such as LinkedIn have embraced. Most people use LinkedIn as a free professional networking tool, but recruiters and sales reps pay a premium to get access to additional features and services. Making LinkedIn a free service enabled the network to gain critical mass so that paid versions would provide significant value to recruiters and sales professionals.

Similarly, at 10gen, most of our customers started using MongoDB because of an independent decision by a developer. The developer builds a prototype, and once it’s working the management team asks how its built. At that point, the management team sees a working app and starts asking about support and services for the underlying technology. In this way, open source technology enters large enterprise through the “back door” via an internal advocate on the development team.

Shorter sales cycle and lower cost of customer acquisition

Because open source software tends to be introduced by developers, by the time companies start talking to an open source vendor, they’ve already decided to use the software. The conversations with the sales team are about the services the vendor offers, rather than the software itself. Hence, sales cycles can be quite short — typically weeks or months.

For proprietary software companies, the first interaction with a prospect is usually much earlier in the decision cycle. A sales rep would approach someone in the management hierarchy about doing a proof of concept using the software product. In this scenario, the selection of software is a top-down decision that can take several quarters or even years to close. These long sales cycles expose vendors to a high degree of risk. They are time consuming and if the deal doesn’t close, the costs are sunk.

Open source sales reps manage many smaller prospective customers across a high-volume of transactions. At open source companies, inbound interest comprises the majority of the sales leads (i.e. people completing a “contact us” form requesting information about pricing). Sales and marketing must focus on scoring and prioritizing a high volume of leads over cold calling or outbound prospecting.

It’s true that many users will continue to use the open source software without paying for services. In that case, the sales rep can quickly and easily move on to the next prospect.

Feedback and Contribution

Open source businesses also have reduced R&D costs. Providing feedback is an important part of the social contract in open source. The user community is extremely willing to provide feedback on features, report bugs, and even contribute fixes. While many users may never pay a vendor for services, the majority of users will contribute to the overall ecosystem and create value for both the vendor and the overall community.

Partners

For any software startup, a key to success is building partnerships with software vendors and systems integrators. Partners help you reach new audiences and deliver services more effectively. Integration with other vendor technologies enables long-term traction.

Partners are much more likely to invest technology with a large community of users, regardless of whether those users pay. Offering your software for free makes it much easier to create a critical mass of users, and, in turn, attract partners who can further proliferate your software.

Free software disrupts entrenched players

When established vendors dominate a market, an open source company has an opportunity to disrupt the market by offering a high-value alternative at a lower price point. Vendors like 10gen can afford to charge lower prices because they benefit from shorter sales cycles and reduced R&D costs through community feedback. Closed source companies cannot afford to lower their pricing as their whole business model depends on charging customer licensing fees. (For more on this topic, you should read Max Schireson’s excellent blog on the value-based pricing trap.)

As I mentioned above, open source software is usually introduced at enterprises through an internal developer champion. In companies accustomed to paying expensive licensing fees, demonstrated cost savings from using open source on a single project can be very powerful. That project becomes the beachhead from which the open source vendor can start to penetrate other groups within the company, and ultimately replace entrenched closed source vendors.

In my next post, I’ll outline monetization strategies across several open source companies.

Jul 15 2012
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Management, NYC, Recruiting, Startups

How to Find a Job at a New York City Startup

There is a lot of buzz around New York City’s emergence as a new hub for technology companies and innovation. The job opportunities are out there, if you know where to look and take the right approach.

Where to look

Lots of companies are hiring, but it can be hard to know where to start. Here are some great resources for finding a job in the New York City startup community.

Job Boards

Startuply, Startupers, and Hackruiter are job boards specifically for startups, and are good places to begin the search. Indeed.com and SimplyHired aggregate all job listings, so most startup positions will also be published there. You will, however, have to sort through lots of noise to find the startups.

The NY Tech Meetup maintains a list of companies based in New York City that includes links to many companies’ job boards. The city also maintains an interactive map of NYC startups with job listings.

You should also investigate local venture capital firms, as many of them have job boards aggregating positions in their portfolio companies. For example, the Union Square Ventures job board is excellent.

Participate in Events and Meetups

There is a vibrant community in New York City, which means lots and lots of events. This is exemplified by the NY Tech Meetup, which is the largest meetup in the world. Every month NYC startups demo their apps at NY Tech Meetup. In addition, there is at least one meetup group for every programming language, as well as meetups for entrepreneurs, community managers, startups, and more.

Even if you aren’t a programmer, consider attending some of the tech meetups to get a flavor of the community. Many growing startups host these meetups to show off their space and raise their profile in the community, so it can be educational to attend.

In addition to the meetup scene, there are lots of events organized specifically to highlight hiring startups in NYC. For example, at WalkAboutNYC, dozens of startups opened their doors to the community in a citywide open house. The Silicon Alley Talent Fair brings many of the hiring startups in one place for a giant, NYC-focused career fair.

Get Educated

Look to expand your skill set with many inexpensive courses available. You can sign up for a community developed course using NYC-based service SkillShare, or check out the educational offerings at General Assembly.

Event Aggregators and Mailing Lists

With so many events, meetups, talent fairs, and more going on, it can be hard to keep track. There are a few mailing lists that have been very beneficial to me in keeping up with NYC tech:

  • Venture Capitalist Charlie O’Donnell runs a mailing list with upcoming tech events and happenings in NY
  • Startup Digest is a free, weekly email digest of startup and tech events
  • Gary’s Guide aggregates events in New York City
  • LinkedList NYC is a weekly newsletter of cool things for engineers to do in New York

Stay Informed

Startups are constantly forming, growing, consolidating, and pivoting. You can stay up to date by reading publications such as Business Insider’s Silicon Alley Insider or BetaBeat, which specifically cover New York Tech.

How to Apply — My Unsolicited Advice

As a hiring manager, I am much more likely to respond to a personal referral, an in-person meeting at a technology event, or a targeted connection on social media. In many cases, I already have candidates in mind — from my network or my colleagues’ network — before I post a job online. And in some cases, a job listing isn’t even posted.

So how do you apply for a job that you don’t even know exists? You need to spend time networking and following companies and entrepreneurs that inspire you. A few, targeted contacts to specific companies will pay off much better than submitting a generic resume to every startup in the city.

A Real World Story: How I Hired Francesca

Mashable recently profiled my colleague, Francesca Krihely, in an article about how Generation Y uses social media to find jobs. Last year, Francesca was interning at a New York City startup, but ready for full time work. She started following several companies that she found particularly interesting — including 10gen. She  began tweeting at me about community management and open source. We agreed to meet over coffee, and she came with a notebook and a list of questions about the company and about being a community manager.

I immediately wanted to hire her, even though that wasn’t what the meeting was explicitly about. She demonstrated that she was smart, social media savvy, knowledgeable about the company, and interested in community management. As we finished our coffee, I gave her a copy of The Little MongoDB Book and asked her, “So, how do I hire someone like you?” The next day, I got this email:

Hi Meghan,

I keep thinking about our conversation from yesterday regarding a new community manager for 10gen, and I’d like to let you know that I might have a good candidate for you: it’s me. Before we had coffee, I got an offer that I was really excited about – but last night I read through the Little MongoDB book. I could not believe that someone from your community wrote that for you under creative commons. That’s the type of community I would love to help nurture and build.

Additionally, I was really energized by our meeting and I keep wondering what it would be like to work at 10gen instead. I don’t want to think back on this opportunity and wonder “what if”

So I guess it’s now or never to ask if my skill set would work for this position.

I really would love to talk with you about this – I think mongo is amazing and it would be so great to work with and learn from you.

Thanks – let me know next steps – hope this email isn’t too forward!

My resume is attached for reference.

All my best,

Francesca

A few weeks later she was on the team.

Another Real World Story: How I Hired Justin

Even if you don’t get the job at the startup that you dream of, if you connect with a few startups as Francesca did, you will, at a minimum, gain contacts and advocates. Here is another real world story.

About six months ago, I met an amazing candidate we’ll call B. Like Francesca, B knew and loved MongoDB. At the time, we didn’t really have a role that matched his skill set but I thought he would be an asset to some of the other startups in my network. I posted his LinkedIn profile to a private forum for Union Square Ventures companies. Within an hour, the CEO of Shapeways emailed me for an intro, and shortly thereafter B had a new job.

A few months later, another candidate, Justin, was interviewing at Shapeways. As a “maker” Shapeways seemed like an obvious option, but there wasn’t a position for him at the time. Upon speaking with Justin, B remembered that 10gen was hiring and referred him over. I was thrilled to meet Justin — he was a Wharton grad, a hobbyist programmer, interested in working at a startup, and he came strongly referred. We hired him. I wonder if he would have even known to apply to 10gen if he hadn’t started talking to Shapeways.

Targeted Networking

As you can see from the examples above, networking in a targeted way is critical. You should use the tools described above – job boards, mailing lists, meetups, etc. – to find out who is hiring, and make connections to those companies. The best gigs might not even be listed on their sites.

Get Recruited

Even better than seeking out employment is having employers seeking you out! Get your name out there:

  • Complete your profile on LinkedIn, using relevant keywords and listing skills and expertise.
  • If you are a programmer, post your code on Github and contribute to open source projects.
  • Maintain a blog and post on topics that demonstrate your expertise and ideas.

Closing with a shameless plug

If you want to work at an awesome New York City startup that is building the next revolution in database software, get in touch with me about careers at 10gen. We’re hiring developers who are passionate about open source, account managers to work with our growing customer base, marketing professionals to build the open source community, and more.

Jun 20 2012
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MongoDB, NYC, Startups

5in5NYC: The MongoDB Episode

5in5NYC is a new online show that features different New York City-based startups every week. The startups pitch their companies and ask one another questions about their businesses. It’s a great concept for building community across startups in New York City, so I was thrilled when Eric Skiff, one of the founders, reached out to us:

I’m a big Mongo fan and have used it in a few projects, and didn’t realize until now that you were in NYC!

Would you be interested in joining us for a taping soon?

I immediately responded and suggested that we put together a “MongoDB show” to highlight some of the interesting companies that are using MongoDB. The show featured Roman Shtylman of bitfloor, Buck Heroux of Next Big Sound, Kareem Kouddous of Crowdtap, Daniel Doubrovkine of Art.sy, and me, representing 10gen.

Interestingly, each of the startups in this group exemplified some of the unique characteristics of New York City. Roman applied his background in finance and high frequency trading to bitfloor, the professional bitcoin exchange that he founded. Buck and the rest of Next Big Sound relocated to New York City from Colorado to get better access to record labels, musicians, and the music industry. Crowdtap spun out of an agency and works with big brands to identify and manage their influential consumers. Art.sy aspires to give the rest of the world access to amazing art — something that New Yorkers definitely take for granted!

In retrospect, 10gen appeared to be the outlier in this group. We’re one of the only pure technology startups in New York City, and definitely the biggest. Many might be skeptical of building a database software company anywhere other than the Valley. I hope that we are paving the way for future software startups here in New York.

Each of the people who spoke on 5in5NYC have been really supportive of MongoDB, blogging, speaking, and generally evangelizing. Thanks again Roman, Buck, Kareem, and dB!

The show is now posted on the 5in5NYC site, so check it out and let me know what you think.

Jun 04 2012
1 Comment
Community, Scaling, Startups

Scaling community by nurturing your power users

When I joined 10gen, the MongoDB community was relatively small. We had a passionate following of users and contributors comprised of early adopters, startuppers, and open source enthusiasts. My first, tactical task at 10gen was to send thank you gifts to all of the contributors (coffee mugs, of course!). It was a fun and informative introduction to some of the early contributors. I enjoyed building relationships with users and seeing their excitement about this new database technology.

As we built out the product and the community, adoption accelerated. It became harder and harder for me to build and maintain personal relationships with everyone in the community. And up until about a year ago, the community and marketing team was tiny (three people, myself included, who also handled finance, sales operations, random admin, and HR). It became apparent that the MongoDB community needed some mechanism to scale effectively.

We needed to develop advocates and leaders who could be the go-to person in certain subsets of the community, whether it was geography or programming language or spoken language. Some leaders emerged organically: Nathen Harvey as the organizer of the DC MongoDB User Group, Rick Copeland in the Python community, Takahiro Inoue with Japanese speakers, and several others. But we needed a way to encourage and support other new leaders.

From this need we developed the MongoDB User Group program and the MongoDB Masters.

We provide financial and logistical support to MongoDB User Groups (MUGs) around the world. My colleague, Francesca, spends time with each MUG organizer helping them find space to host events, connect with speakers, and promote their meetups through the MongoDB community. We’ve developed and documented best practices for MUGs and have a mailing list for the organizers. Francesca also worked closely with the team at Meetup.com to establish a global account on to manage the groups.

The MongoDB Masters is a program to recognize leaders in the MongoDB community, and facilitate communication between those leaders and 10gen. It’s a meta community: we’re organizing the organizers, and building a community of leaders. It started out simple, with a mailing list for discussion of new features and releases, community events, and more. We brought the group together for the first Masters Summit at MongoSV at the end of last year. We’re planning to do more regional and online events in the future.

These programs have not been without their challenges. For example, I was taken by surprise when the Masters program inadvertently became a recruiting pipeline (we ended up hiring several people who attended the Masters Summit). This means that we have to work harder to continue to recruit nominations for new members. And the success of the MUGs has been inconsistent across groups and takes constant effort to sustain.

I'm Speaking at OSCON 2012 (size 300 X 250)

At OSCON, SCALE 10x, and several other forums, I have spoken about how 10gen built the community around MongoDB. During those talks, I touched on how we work with community leaders. I’m looking forward to going into greater depth on this topic at Open Source Bridge on June 26-29, and OSCON on July 18. I’ll talk about organizing the organizers and the challenges and rewards that go along with that. I’m looking forward to getting lots of feedback on the sessions and to learn what others have done successfully. I hope to see you there!

For those of you interested in attending OSCON this year, you can register using the discount code GILL10GEN for a 20% discount on any package.

I will be sure to post my slides after the conferences.

May 25 2012
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Events, NYC, Startups

New York City Really Needs a Community Space for Tech Events

On Wednesday, we held our third annual MongoNYC conference, hosting over 900 attendees. I would consider the event a major success, with lots of new content from 10gen engineers, the MongoDB ecosystem, and community users. While I was very pleased with the turn out and the content, the venue was pretty horrible, and didn’t reflect well on 10gen or New York City.

More than any other city, we have struggled to find large, affordable venues in New York City that are easily accesible via public transportation. (This is coming from someone who has personally organized dozens of events all over the world.) I’ve felt the pain the past three years as MongoNYC has grown. It was challenging to find space for MongoNYC when it was 200 people in 2010, 500 people in 2011, and 900 in 2012. I’m at a loss for next year, where we anticipate 1500+. So far it looks like our options are limited to expensive hotels or the Javits Center.

New York City is increasingly becoming a hub for technological innovation, and the growth of MongoNYC reflects that trend:

As the startup and technology community grows in New York, it’s becoming increasingly important that the infrastructure is in place to support that community. This includes things like more reliable high speed internet, more engineering and product talent, and successful startups — all brilliantly outlined in Chris Dixon’s post about what the NYC startup world needs on his blog. In addition to those items, New York City needs better venues for developer events and conferences. A conference center would be extremely beneficial both for bringing the local community together and drawing tech talent from other parts of the world to New York City.

Major developer conferences like PyCon, JavaOne, RailsConf, etc. just don’t happen in New York City (Fred Wilson recently lamented this fact on AVC). To be viewed as a center of innovation, New York City needs to be seen as an option for these events. (In contrast, between the Santa Clara Convention Center, Moscone Center, Bently Reserve, Hilton San Francisco, the Mission Bay Conference Center, and the San Jose Conference Center, there is no shortage of meeting spaces in the Bay Area. And Boston has a great community venue in the Microsoft NERD Center, where lots of free events are held.)

Many people travelled from around the country to attend MongoNYC. This could be the perfect opportunity to show them that New York City is a viable alternative to Silicon Valley if you want to work at or found a startup. I hope that those that came to MongoNYC realized that from the quality of the attendees and presentations. They certainly didn’t get that impression from the venue!

More people talking about tech is a good thing for raising the profile of NYC as a tech hub. Perhaps the NYC economic development organizations could subsidize such events. Or, one of the non-profits focused on technology in NYC (NYTM, Startup Foundation, etc.) could make community events and space a core part of their mission. I’d love to hear your ideas for addressing this issue.

May 05 2012
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Adoption, Marketing, Startups

7 tips for getting started with developer marketing

I’ve been talking to more and more developer-focused businesses about how to get started with marketing to developers. In most cases, these companies were founded by engineers who are unsure how to take the first steps, and have limited bandwidth to do so. I wanted to highlight a few easy tips for getting started with developer marketing.

1. Make your service easy to use

In many presentations and posts, I’ve cited ease of installation, officially supported language drivers, and document-based model as key drivers for adoption of MongoDB. Similarly, I admire Twilio for their ability to give a 5-minute demo showing how dead simple it is to use their service. Engineers have limited time to experiment with new technologies, so getting started must be frictionless.

2. Focus on support

With limited bandwidth to market your product, you have to rely on word of mouth from your existing users. Giving your users a great support experience is one of the best ways to win them over and get them excited about your product and community. At 10gen we like to say that giving users a “good” support experience in our free forums isn’t good enough. If we give people a great experience, they’ll love MongoDB and tell all of their friends.

3. Blog about industry topics

Early on, when your brand name is probably not yet recognizable, you should spend some time blogging about industry topics to demonstrate your expertise. Apigee, for example, has an excellent blog that covers general topics around API best practices. Similarly, at 10gen, our CEO wrote a multi-part blog series on distributed consistency. These types of posts establish you as a thought leader and drive interest in your products.
If you’re struggling to find the time to write detailed technical posts, keep your blog up to date with a weekly or monthly round-up of community posts on relevant topics, or announcements about new features and events. Another easy way to generate content is to do short interviews with users, and get them to talk about how your product is great (see this post on AppHarbor for example). The key with blogging is consistency, so set a target (at a minimum, once a month) and stick to it. A short post is better than nothing at all!

4. Showcase your users

New adopters will always ask “Who is using your product?” The earlier you can start a public listing of users to which you can send people, the better. On MongoDB.org, we have a Production Deployments page that lists the logos of users and a short blurb on how they are using MongoDB. If there are more in-depth blog posts or case studies, we link out from that page. Getting this started should be fairly easy, and many of your users should be eager to get listed as a form of co-marketing.

5. Set up a newsletter

Adoption isn’t only about getting new users; it’s also crucial to keep existing users engaged and interested in your product. As you are collecting sign ups for your service, a newsletter is a great way for your community to get to know you. You can re-use blog content, highlight upcoming events that you’re participating in, announce new features, and link to community blog posts.

6. Participate in Community Events

Local meetups and user groups are always looking for speakers, sponsors, and hosts. Make an effort to get your team to attend a certain number of local meetups every month to meet the community face to face, and offer to speak at these groups. (You can re-use the content from a blog post and turn it into a presentation!) If you are traveling to visit a customer or for an industry event, try to add on a visit to the local user group in the area.

7. Start looking for marketing talent

Finding someone who understands developer marketing isn’t easy, so keep an eye out early on. The person that you hire could be someone internally who grows into the role, or an enthusiast from your community.

Apr 19 2012
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NYC, Startups, User Groups

Building a Venue Directory for NYC Tech Events

As a co-organizer of the NY MongoDB User Group, NYC Python Meetup Group, NY C/C++ Developers Group, and Prince Building Tech Talks, I know how tough it can be to find a space to host a meetup in NYC. I’ve made some great contacts over the past few years, and as a result people frequently ask me about finding a venue to host their meetup.

Rather than fielding these requests in an ad hoc manner, I’d like to put together a directory of venues for tech events and meetups. Right now I’m in the research phase of this project, and I’m starting to compile a list of companies interested in hosting. To that end, I’ve put together two simple webforms: One where companies can express interest in hosting events, and one for organizers that are looking for space.

Initially, I’m happy to act as a matchmaker to connect meetup organizers with potential hosts. I will not share contact information without confirming with both sides that there is a potential match. Over time, I would like to make this directory public, with the permission from the hosting companies.

Looking forward to your thoughts and feedback on this project!

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