Four Months of DevRel

DevRel is one of those jobs that is intentionally ambiguous. People have an idea of what it means in theory, but each company’s use of a developer advocate is so wildly different.

For a good overview of what the ideal devrel is: https://leerob.com/devrel. Lee Robinson is one of the goats of devrel - he built the entire developer marketing arm of Vercel. I’m sure most of you know Vercel - and that’s the point. Vercel is so trusted by developers that even Claude recommends you host your website on Vercel. That’s the end goal of devrel: make developers know about, understand, love, and use your product.

But what does that look like in practice?

I’ve been a Developer Advocate for 4 months at Chalk. We are an AI data platform - providing context and infrastructure for models and agents. What that means is our user is a Data Scientist, Data Engineer, Machine Learning Engineer or AI Engineer. And in order to get those personas to buy - you need to sell/market in a way that speaks to them. That’s where I come in.

But how I do that varies every single day. Here’s a (non-comprehensive) list of what I’ve done so far:

OOH (Out of Home) Campaign

In our first real marketing campaign, Chalk showed up to AI Council and Snowflake Summit. But, we needed people to hear about us all around these conferences. Enter: a bus. We had a double decker bus slathered in Chalk advertising driving around these conferences. We really wanted people to constantly be thinking about us. My part in this: I wrote almost all the words that are plastered on the bus. The idea itself was a hodgepodge of teamwork, but using that base idea and coming up with something creative that was relevant to our product was the hard part.

You might be wondering - why was that hard? How creative can you be selling AI infrastructure? Well see for yourself.

Yeah, that’s right. We put an exploding bus on a bus. If you’ve watched the movie Speed (a 1994 Keanu Reaves + Sandra Bullock classic), you’ll get the reference. The original movie line is “Pop quiz, hotshot. There’s a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes 50 miles an hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below 50, it blows up. What do you do? What do you do?” Not to toot my own horn, but we did a pretty bangin job making this bus eye-catching.

Conferences

As I mentioned above, Chalk showed up to a few different conferences, the main one being Snowflake Summit. Up until 4 months ago - I was an engineer. But, I also tend to think I have some semblance of charisma. That means I can talk to people, have engaging conversations, and demo our product. Which basically means I the perfect booth man. And boy did I sit at booths. For AI council, I had 3 12 hour shifts. And something similar for Snowflake. And it turns out - I’m pretty fucking good at it. People internally were raving about my capability at the booth. And that - that felt really fucking good. To have people blasting public slack channels with “Rishi is killing at the booth” - holy shit did that feel good.

Launching a New Product

We launched Chalk Compute at Snowflake Summit. And launching a product in my shoes means doing everything. Actually coding and making the product. Dogfooding the product and fixing bugs. Creating docs from scratch. Creating ideal use cases. Creating demos for those ideal use cases. Writing sales decks to pitch customers. Creating a marketing splash page. Figuring out how we sell this thing - acting as an engineer, product manager, and product marketing for an entirely new product.

And holy shit was that exciting. I’ve never done something 0 to 100 like that - and it was revolutionary. It felt so good to see it all come to fruition - I spent many nights up till 2 am fixing it. So to see it on stage, getting introduced live at Snowflake Summit was an insane dopamine spike.

Demos

This one is kinda vague - but basically in order to see how to use our product, we have to show customers how we apply Chalk to their specific vertical. For me, that meant coding an example of “Chalk for Gaming”, “Chalk for Lending”, and many more. That also meant creating short demos that could be shown at the booth of a conference - for both our Feature Engine and Compute.

Sales

Sales enablement. In a product as technical as Chalk - enabling sales to actually go sell is an entire process. From creating entire sales pitches and common verbiage, to creating battle cards, to drafting technical follow-ups - I did it all.

Engineering

As I mentioned, I used to be a software engineer. And when push comes to shove and we need shit fixed - I still hop in and take some tickets. Obviously I’m heavily using Claude, but it really reminds me that my technical ability is still needed and essential.

Competitive Landscape

The feature store category has been overwhelmed recently. Databricks and Snowflake have both recently released real time feature stores and there’s a slew of other feature store competitors. Part of my first month was documenting the current landscape - where we win, where we do our best work, and where others are genuinely better. It takes someone deeply technical to really understand that and document it in a way that is trusted for everyone else at the company. You are creating a truth that everyone else accepts.

Technical Authority

Similar to that last point, everything Chalk does is deeply technical. From slides at a conference to blogs - everything we put out into the ether needs to be technically accurate. And I am that authority. Every technical piece of content has been created or reviewed by me. Basically, I’m BIG MAN BLASTOISE.

Docs

A somewhat boring point compared to a bus, but a necessary one. Docs are essential. They prove you are the technical authority. Even more, in the age of agents - docs are the sources that agents use to write clean code. For a developer tool, the examples on the docs are the boilerplate that agents work from. I’ve done everything on docs - from launching new docs, to reworking existing ones. There’s so much more to do here, and a big project of mine is making a Developer Learning Center (coming soon).

Blogs

There’s all sorts of blogs - deep technical dives, SEO engagement farming, product launches/changelogs, and also marketing blogs. All of these sit with me - from announcing our spring fling lineup to diving deep on how Chalk works, if I didn’t write it myself, you bet your ass I reviewed it.

Cross-Functional

Whew. So we’ve covered a lot. And that’s not even everything. That’s just what me sleep deprived brain can come up with. As you can see - I do everything. Or in corporate speak, I’m “extremely cross functional”. That also means I interact with everyone at the company. I knew that going in - so my first two weeks were a slew of 1:1’s, getting to know everyone and making genuine connections. You never know when you’re gonna need the head of infrastructure for something, or when the VP of Sales is gonna ask you for help. And so, I really made myself known! I wanted people to be able to reach out to me for help whenever, and also, I wanted to be able to reach out to everyone whenever. Here’s some proof of me bonding with my lovely coworkers.

Whitewater Rafting

Constant Poker Fiend

Picture below is fake and has never happened.

Whiskey Tasting!

So yeah, I be doing fuckin everything and anything.

I think in the future, I want to get closer to the ideal devrel - but its an evolving field and a startup, so you put the best player on the field when you need them.

My Use of AI:

Anything writing focused - like this - I hand write completely. And I’m very proud of that. Writing is so human - and I would never want AI to replace that part of me.