Solve problems - developer marketing with Julie Reboul
Julie Reboul runs Algolia's ambassador program almost single-handedly — just 15 people in a Slack channel — because she'd rather nurture a small group of genuine champions than let the community become just another support channel with no real relationships behind it.
Julie Reboul is senior developer marketing manager at Algolia, a search and recommendation API, where she's worked for five years after previous roles at Microsoft, Twitter, and Orange.
We get into how she splits developer marketing responsibilities with a developer advocate partner — she runs the roadmap and logistics, he's the face on stage — why Algolia's co-marketing partnerships with companies like Contentful stay developer-to-developer rather than running through the business partnerships team, and how watching the team rebuild from just two developer relations people down to one, then back up again, shaped her thinking about community.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at jack@scalingdevtools.com.
Could you tell us about the kinds of things you're working on at Algolia?
My role is developer marketing. Algolia is a search and recommendation API, so our product is made for developers and by developers. We have different types of marketing people — most do business marketing because the decision-makers are often more business-oriented personas, while I focus specifically on developer marketing: selling Algolia to developers and showcasing what our product can actually do. Developers tend to be allergic to marketing, so I try to create things that are genuinely useful to them. I organize a podcast called Developer Experience hosted by one of our staff engineers, Sara Dayan, and we run live coding sessions — online events with code on screen and down-to-earth examples of using Algolia alongside another API. I also run our ambassador program: about 15 ambassadors we nurture in a Slack channel, trying to recognize the champions who've used Algolia for a while and show them we care about them.
How do you cultivate that community, especially the ambassador program?
We wanted to keep it small at first. It's mostly me on my own, with Chuck, a developer advocate on our team, helping work with the ambassadors. At some point we'll need more people so it doesn't become just another Slack channel. To give context on the team structure: I'm part of the developer experience team, which includes developer marketing — just me — developer relations, currently just Chuck though we're hiring three more, a documentation team, a programs team, and an engineering team building demos, code-exchange platforms, documentation platforms, and CLI dev tools. Right now I'm really working as a duo with Chuck. I think that's the natural shape of a developer marketing role, because I don't come from a developer background myself — I come from marketing — and developers trust other developers and technical people speaking to them. It's genuinely a partnership.
How do you and Chuck divide what you each focus on?
I'd describe myself as more of a behind-the-scenes person, while Chuck is more the person speaking on stage. For live coding sessions, for example, I create the roadmap for the year's topics, handle leadership opportunities from developers, partners, and our product team, and manage the budget. Right now I'm the project manager organizing our first Algolia developer conference, DevCon, in September, and Chuck will be fully involved — speaking at sessions, being community moderator, being the face of Algolia at the event. He also does a lot on his own beyond what I organize, like blog posts, demos, and working directly with the product team.
What do you think attracts developers to join Algolia's live sessions or conferences specifically?
We want to always give to developers rather than take from them. It's not 'come see a demo of our product,' because that can be boring — why would they care? It's more 'you have a problem, we can help you fix it, come to this live coding session and solve your pain point in under an hour.' It's about solving real problems, not about promoting Algolia itself.
You mentioned you also do co-marketing, which isn't something a lot of companies do. How does that work?
We're a company for developers, and while some developers know us, a lot don't yet — and we realized other companies have the same struggle. So we look for companies with the same DNA, communicating to a similar audience, and bundle up with them. Contentful is a good example — we build a developer-advocate-to-developer-advocate relationship, with a monthly meeting to figure out what we can do together, whether that's joining each other's podcasts or sharing a booth and a joint demo at a conference we're both sponsoring. The difference from a formal partnership, which we also have with Contentful through our business partner managers, is that co-marketing is developer to developer — less about dollars, more about content and community.
Could you share a bit about the culture at Algolia and how your team fits into it?
I've been at Algolia for a bit over five years. I started on the field marketing team doing events, back when everything was in person, always focused on the developer audience. Around COVID we realized it wasn't just about events but about the content we create and how we gather the community, so my title changed from marketing to developer marketing. For a while I was inside the growth marketing team, which made sense since developers are the ones who sign up and drive growth. But now, about two months into the brand-new developer experience team combining developer marketing, developer relations, documentation, and engineering, I feel like I'm really where I belong — real collaboration across the whole team. Even after five years, it still feels like a new challenge every time.
Five years at a fast-growing startup is a long time. What kind of changes have you seen?
When I started we were around 70 people worldwide; now we're around 700. We've opened a lot of offices too — it was just San Francisco and Paris when I joined, and now we have San Francisco, Paris, New York, Atlanta, London, Bucharest, Austin, and Japan. What's funny is that when we were 70 people, we already had a developer relations team of two — and now we're down to one. People came and left at the pace of a fast startup, so we've had to rebuild the developer advocate function from scratch, which is exciting because I get to bootstrap it again.
In your five years there, what do you think Algolia does really well that's driven its success?
We try to stick as close as possible to developers, and that's become an even bigger priority again in the last couple of years. A good example is our documentation — we've always tried to have the best documentation we could write, just to make it as easy as possible for developers to use us. That shows how much we've cared about developer experience even before we had a dedicated developer experience team.