Effective developer events & developer sponsorships with Kimmy Leslie
Kimmy Leslie's first year of sponsorships at Stream was pure research — asking her own DevRel team what they read, watched, and would actually respect a sponsorship in. By year two, the community itself started reaching out to her with sponsorship opportunities before she had to go looking for them.
Kimmy Leslie is a marketer at Stream, a chat and activity feed SDK, working closely with the company's director of DevRel on events and sponsorships.
We get into why developers are inherently marketing-averse and what that means for how you pitch sponsorships, why she splits sponsorship spend between top-of-funnel bets and directly trackable UTM campaigns, and why sponsoring full YouTube programming tutorials paired with a free 'maker' plan turned into one of Stream's most durable growth channels.
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.
What does community actually mean at Stream?
Community is working with like-minded people in a way that serves the greater good — noticing you're part of a network and intentionally caring about and engaging with it. In my role that means staying socially aware, genuinely caring about people, remaining humble, extending grace, having gratitude, and never losing that sense of giving back. Stream is a people-first company, so that ethos flows naturally down from leadership.
You've run a lot of developer events. What actually makes an event good in this space?
I joined this space around two and a half to three years ago, right as the world shut down, so for most of my time here events have been virtual. A good event has to be well organized and deliver a genuine return on investment — analytics, real touch points — but it also needs brand awareness, connection, networking, and a genuinely good experience. Hitting both of those buckets, ROI and experience, is what separates a good event from a mediocre one.
When you first joined Stream with essentially a blank canvas for events and sponsorships, how did you approach it?
I work directly and closely with Stream's director of DevRel, and one thing he constantly reminds me is that developers are inherently marketing-averse. So working in this space is really about demonstrating and proving why someone needs your product, which requires a genuinely strong use case, hitting the right target audience, customizing messaging so it actually aligns with your goals, and continually searching for the right channels to reach all of that.
What would you tell a startup that isn't doing any events or sponsorships yet and doesn't know where to start?
My first year was almost entirely research and trial sponsorships — asking developers on our own team what they read, what they watch, what they find interesting, and where they'd want us to show up. I'd run ideas past the DevRel team specifically, since they're embedded in that exact SDK audience, and they'd tell me straight up whether something made sense or was garbage. It was a lot of listening to them combined with my own research and trial and error to see what actually worked.
Did that approach change over time as you built more of a track record?
By my second year, a lot of sponsorship opportunities started coming to me instead of me having to go find them, because we'd built real relationships within that tight-knit developer community through our DevRel team. Partners started reaching out asking if Stream wanted to be involved in something coming up. That's the value of genuinely investing in DevRel — you're not just present in the community, you're actually listening to it, and that reciprocity is what made it sustainable.
Do those community relationships feed back into the product itself, not just marketing?
Absolutely. I'm not technical myself, but we've actually hired people directly out of our own community to work on our SDKs — the relationships built through community and DevRel work go well beyond marketing.
There's often tension between marketing spend that drives immediate signups and spend with a longer, less certain payoff. How do you think about balancing that?
This is genuinely the fun part for me — building UTMs for sponsorships and tracking their actual performance. Sponsorship spend splits into two buckets: top-of-funnel bets, where you're sponsoring something and trusting there'll be a return even though you can't directly track it, possibly months down the line, and directly trackable campaigns, where a UTM link shows an immediate, measurable effect. I choose sponsorships based on audience fit, budget, and whether it meets our broader goals, then attach a UTM from day one so we can track it through our marketing ops tooling and report real ROI back to the team — because ultimately you have to prove you took the budget you were given and delivered results with it.
When a sponsorship performs really well, what do you do next — just repeat it?
There's no single answer, but you always have to think about audience saturation. It's not just about finding the right niche audience and customizing your message within a sponsorship — you also don't want to hit the same audience with the same message over and over. So the answer to something working well isn't simply repeating it for two years; it's about rotating, adjusting, and continuing to find new channels alongside what's already working.
How would you advise someone just starting out to allocate budget across different events and sponsorships?
That's genuinely unique to each company. Our team works with an OKR model — you need to set clear objectives and understand the key results you're aiming for, and every dollar you spend has to align with those goals. Stream's VP of Marketing is very numbers-driven but also one of the most human-aware people I know, so we balance genuine community engagement with things that make clear business sense. My advice is to experiment with different channels for a set window, three to six months works well for us, track the actual results, and keep reaching for new creative channels. One of our team goals is finding what we call 'evergreen fits' — channels that keep delivering results and retaining value over time, rather than one-off wins.
You've done some interesting work with YouTube sponsorships specifically. What makes that channel unique?
YouTube is unusual because instead of a one-time hit, it's essentially a permanent investment — someone might save a video to watch over the weekend or hear an ad and only act on it a year later. We've done standard mid-roll and pre-roll ads, but we've also sponsored full programming tutorial channels, which works really well for us because our audience wants to actually see the product demoed. We pair that with our free maker plan and free chat trial, so the sponsored creator can say 'sign up now and follow along with me' in real time.
What's the actual thinking behind offering a free 'maker' plan when a lot of competitors don't?
We've always offered a free 30-day chat trial with no credit card required, but introducing the maker account specifically was a real boost for my marketing efforts, since I work so closely with the DevRel team promoting to builders and tinkerers. It has a few requirements, but it's a genuinely easy on-ramp for side projects and small startups who don't want to commit financially before they've validated their idea — and it directly ties back to what we talked about earlier: word of mouth and community are what actually bring people in. Plenty of people find us because someone in the community specifically recommended Stream to them over a more expensive competitor.