The Art of Community Building | Postman's Joyce Lin

0:00Some of our community complains today, there's too much in Postman. Just do your one thing, stay in your hole and do the one thing really well. And we do have a lot of features. It's like an IDE. You know how to do like three things, five things, 10 things, but there's a thousand things you could do. And so one of the directives from our CEO is anything that you add, take something out. Stop just adding more things. Think really hard and then talk to at least 50 users that are using it before you even come to me and propose it. Attention, engineering leaders. It is your last chance to register for the Dev & Reptid live stream.

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1:07Hurry now while you still can and register. You'll find the link in the show notes. Now, on with today's episode. So, hey, everyone. Welcome to Dev Interrupted. This is your co-host, Connor Bronsden, and today we're joined by Joyce Lin. Joyce is the head of developer relations at Postman. Joyce, welcome to the show. Thank you, Connor. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, it's a pleasure having you with us today. We're going to go chat about a few topics, what's going on at Postman, APIs, community building, which is a favorite of mine, and of course, TikTok. So yeah, absolutely. I really am excited to hear about your strategy there and how it's impacted your community building efforts.

1:42But let's start by getting to know Postman a bit better for those in the audience who don't know Postman is an API platform for developers. Why is that so important? Yeah, so Postman is an API platform and a lot of developers know Postman for an API client and a bunch of the other stuff along the API development lifecycle. Managers, maybe not. They might not know unless they came from development backgrounds, but we have currently, it's 20 million users around the world. And it's not just developers, it's testers, tech writers, a bunch of other functions. So fairly ubiquitous now and working with APIs is, I mean, you can't get away from working with APIs.

2:20So that's part of the success of Postman. Yeah, I think I've heard you call APIs table stakes. And frankly, I agree with that. Yeah, so like every company has internal APIs for sure. And the table stakes I'm talking about is if you have a public API, I looked, I think it was last year, it's probably been a full 12 months now. I looked at the Forbes Cloud 100 and just manually looked to see who has a public API. And it was almost every single one of them. And by the time I published my findings, it was like, I think one or two did not have a public API. So for cloud services, it's table stakes.

2:56Like if you don't have it, you're not looking great to potential consumers. And that's been a huge shift in the industry the last five, 10 years, it feels like. I think so. And I think it's part of, you know, development moving faster, people releasing new stuff faster, getting a little bit more competitive. And APIs are a way for you to decouple some of the work so that people aren't waiting on your eng team to deliver. And so decoupling that allows your partners to then just, you know, go sky's the limit. So I think most folks listening would agree with what you're saying. You know, we need APIs.

3:28They probably have at least one that they're doing internally, probably externally as well. But there's also a lot of buzz around other topics that maybe relate to APIs, things like low code versus no code. How does that fit into the work that Postman's doing as an API platform? So low code, no code is typically a wrapper around traditional infrastructure. So traditional web development APIs. Postman actually launched a low-code, no-code tool. I would call it low-code, not no-code, about a year and a half ago. And it's had a huge uptick. I mean, we see people who, of course, are technical working with APIs, but there's PMs, there's partner engineers.

4:08There's just like a ton of different people who aren't building APIs, consuming them. And so low-code, no-code is just a way to empower primarily people, at least for the Postman product, primarily people who don't have the whole setup. Maybe they don't have an IDE, they don't have a local development environment or sandbox at the ready. It's a way for them to start tinkering and building. But I also see low code being very popular with developers who just want to save time. Totally. I think that it's really fair to say that APIs have one, right? Everyone is expected to have one for external facing to enable different collaborations, different innovations with other products.

4:45And now to your point, Postman and APIs are winning the next level of, okay, if we are enabling more people to be able to be, you know, essentially developers in training or to have that skill set, either through low-code platforms or through AI, obviously a huge driving innovation, we still need ways to actually enable these interactions. And I think that's exactly where Postman slots it. Yeah, I mean, you said it. APIs have won. And if this podcast was called, hey, people, APIs are really important, I would immediately shut this off because why? Like, there's no debate there anymore. It's kind of like API security or quality.

5:23You know, there are still some people that don't really care about it. But like, if you publicly let it be known that you don't care about it, people will not buy your product. Yeah, I think that's really well said. So what then makes Postman so special in this mix? I know there's some pieces around centralization versus embedding of APIs and teams. How are you approaching this now important table stakes piece of the world? Well, I think part of Postman's success is that we rode the coattails of the growth of APIs, right? Everyone's working with it. And we were one of the first people, first movers in the space.

6:00And so we became very ubiquitous. I just learned they're teaching Postman at boot camps, you know, in universities. Of course, like just something to help you work with APIs. And so I don't think it's, I don't want to say this, like it's not nothing that we've done. It's just that we've been positioned properly and then listened to the community. And I think you want to talk about this later, but that's something that our founders did well early on is really get to know our early adopters, like the friendlies. any startup of a certain size is going to know those people on a first name basis. And to this day, I still Rolodex.

6:36You know what a Rolodex is? I do, though a lot of Gen Zers listening might not. I have a mental roster of, oh, there's this feature and this team, this organization is really big into low code, no code or something like that. And so I have a mental roster of who those friendlies or who those power users are. Man, I was really excited to talk about community. is a perfect segue into how Postman's founders have enabled community from the start. But now you have me reeling, Joyce, because I'm just remembering that I know the word Rolodex and a lot of people on the planet don't anymore. So thank you for that.

7:10You're welcome. Yeah. I do think this drives into exactly what you're referencing here, though, is Postman has always worked to understand the community and its users and really deliver value to people who are using the platform. And we can get into how TikTok is now enabling the next level of your community. And maybe that'll tie it back to our Rolodex. But I'd love to dive in more on what you were saying around the founders and their devotion to community from the start. What has it meant to build a community and how have they approached it? Yeah, so this has changed year to year. I just celebrated my six-year anniversary at Postman, which is like eons.

7:44Congratulations. Well, thank you. And in the very early days, I joined after product market fit. So we already had, I want to say like 3 million users when I joined in, now we're 20 million. And so I think early on when you're trying to find product market fit, that is so important. But if you don't hold on to that, you will burn your community because your community will come to rely on you for certain things or know you for certain things. And we see this, I mean, that whole Twitter situation going on with the developer community there. Twitter was one of the first public APIs to say like, okay, we're really sorry, developers.

8:20We kind of messed up and we're going to make it right by investing in our developer community. They spent a decade building all that, you know, social capital and building that community. And Twitter is one of, actually, it doesn't matter what, maybe if it's banned in certain countries, but worldwide, a lot of people learning about APIs are trying Twitter's API. And now with the recent announcements of transitioning to a paid, but not just paid, but like a super expensive API, it's like, what are you doing? It's going backwards. And it's really burning those bridges that you mentioned they've created.

8:52It feels like that kind of product switch is so alien to what has maybe made the product successful. And in particular, I see Postman is doing the opposite, right? You're doubling down on your community. You're saying, how can we continue to deliver for you? Is that the approach that you're taking internally? It is internally. And I don't want to get cocky because working for Postman, I get to wear my Postman t-shirt and random strangers will come up to me and just tell me their stories about like a dev tool and how much they like a dev tool. And our marketing helps. We have a really cute persona and it's very friendly, it's approachable.

9:29You know, to any founder out there, to any like manager, don't get cocky because as soon as you burn those bridges or as soon as you stoke ill will or like demonstrate sinister like corporate greed, like you will lose that trust that you've worked so hard to build. and it's really hard to get back. I mean, I won't name names, but yeah. Well, we already called out Twitter, so. Yeah, yeah. So let's talk tactics then. If I'm an engineering leader who's listening here and maybe I'm building a dev tool, how would you approach kind of extending your user base into a true community and creating this moat to defend your work?

10:09Yeah, so this has changed over the years. In the early days, it was just listening and having people try the user stories and then watching them. And so every single channel, some teams will be like, well, we're understaffed. So, you know, let's funnel everything to one channel. Let's funnel everything to our support desk or something. And we decided very early on, no, people can say anything wherever they're at, open all channels and we'll take the onus and aggregate it. That way we're meeting people, developers, testers, whoever, where they're at. And then it's like really burdensome, but like, then you get a lot more feedback.

10:47And yeah, go ahead. I was just going to ask what the approach has been to do that aggregation, because it does sound really challenging. It does. And I can't say that we're the most data driven. We do have a couple systems that we use, like just really like manual systems that we use, but it's also like talking to humans. Like if you talk to 50 humans and yet you have all this data behind you to support it, Talking to humans is going to be a lot more enlightening than only relying on the data. Let that enrich your data set. I think that's a really wonderful perspective. And I see that a lot with tools in modern spaces where we tend to over-rely on data instead of saying data should guide us to then have these person-to-person conversations with customers, with users, and then take that to figure out how to approach whatever problems that you have.

11:36And I know that's guided a lot of postman's development and also the decision making, it seems like. Yeah, I mean, we have something that, you know, we released recently or we announced recently where the data shows a very, very tiny percentage of our population will be impacted. So like, let's just move fast with it. And as soon as we announced it, oh man, it was a very vocal response from many different channels. And we're currently in the process of aggregating that anecdotal feedback from different channels. And the PMs are looking at that data. And it's, if we had only relied on the data, and it's still in state of flux.

12:11So I'm not calling it a success story yet, but it's real time. You cannot only rely on that data. Are there particular pieces of that listening to community building upon their advice, also extending it to work with data that you would say have made both Postman particularly successful? Like any key tips or anything that you would say founders today who are thinking about starting a company and want to listen to the community should particularly apply less. I can't say that Postman's leading the way, but some of the mistakes that we've made along the way, we've definitely learned from. And now we have a pretty robust beta program.

12:47So we have a certain cadence where we roll things out just to have the proper soak time hardening. in some of our, we were talking about low code, no code. We have a product called flows that has been in beta for about a year. And the UI, like the UX of it has really changed. And it's because of these people that are like, that's so cool. I'm going to build on it. I'm going to make videos. I'm going to teach it. I love totally outside of Postman. And it's, they're providing the most valuable feedback that we could possibly like, you know, like it's thankless, but then they get to help make the product.

13:25And I think that's a sign of the success you've had around building community, right? Where people start to extend and take out use cases that maybe you never even imagined or hadn't had time to even touch yet. So that's a kudos to you and the rest of the team over there at the work you've done. Have you found in particular over this last year, as we've kind of entered some challenging times for a lot of tech companies, that your community has been a bulwark for you against the economic conditions that a lot of others are facing? The price sensitivity around working with APIs is not there. And there's a lot of people who are trying to get more value out of the paid plans that we have, but we are freemium.

14:04And so there's a ton of people that are just looking for free alternatives and then they start with the free and then they upgrade to the paid once they start actually using it robustly. So in your day-to-day when you're working with the community around Postman, are you typically going out and speaking to folks? Are you going out and writing? What's kind of the tactical approach that you take? So on developer relations, we have developer advocates. We have technical community manager, tech writer. And so everyone's day looks a little bit different. But for the people that are working with the community, it is writing blog posts.

14:39It's communicating about new releases. Our eng team is so fast. It's kind of a struggle keeping up with them. So communicating about the new releases is very important. Meeting, again, the developers and the testers where they're at. So going out to virtual and in real life events. And then we have an ambassador program. Other people, other extended family are doing all this stuff, making videos, creating courses on behalf of the Postman community. And so just doing what we can to support them. Can you talk to me a bit about that ambassador program? I think that's something that a lot of companies aspire to have, but maybe have challenges to actually implement.

15:17Yeah, and we're still in the early stages. We have a program called Supernovas because, again, there's so many people creating content. We have been a little behind the ball. We're trying to support them financially, socially, just give them their exposure. But we've been kind of lagging behind that. We took a look at some ambassador programs like Auth0 has a very robust one. Docker Captains is another one. And so there's a lot of different models you can choose. But for us, we're choosing to reward people who are hosting community events, you know, in their market or at conferences and creating content.

15:55It's a really good way for us to leverage. You know, I might create a piece about how to use variables in this way, but there's 50 ways you could do that. And so having that told in many different voices is a huge value. Are you collating that content and kind of saying, hey, this is community content. Here's what we've seen. Here's what we should share. Or how are you approaching that? Primarily from a social's perspective. We don't have a central index where we're cataloging everything. I did just launch something. Google, do you know Google CodeLabs? I do, yeah. So they have that open source format.

16:31And I contributed to another developer community, Snowflakes Database CodeLab. And I was like, this is so easy. See, why doesn't Postman have something like that? So maybe a few weeks ago, I just randomly transported like 10 modules and now I just launched. And now I'm hoping that community members will submit code labs. I love it. Well, if anyone's listening, I think you know something you could do if you happen to be a Postman user. Yeah. I'm also really curious to touch back on something you mentioned earlier, which is learning from mistakes that were made along the way. What hasn't worked that you've learned from as you've built the community, as you've worked with content creators who are nascent around your product?

17:11What's been the approach? So you're going to get me in trouble, Connor, with my boss. I wouldn't, let me rephrase that from mistakes to lessons learned along the way. Yeah, there we go. And I would say not every single product release we have is one of those mistakes, but being open to listening is one thing. And I'll come back to that because there's kind of a juicy nugget there. But the other thing is reorganizations, right? Right. Developer relations at Postman has belonged to three different functions a couple different times, let's say, because I've been there so long, I've seen all these different iterations.

17:45And somebody said this where reorgs are a sign of growth. It's not like, oh, no, you're not performing well. So we're just going to like do something. Right. It's because the organizational focus has changed. Your OKRs have changed. if you're no longer aligned. And I have this dumb example that's space related, but it's like a little space satellite where if you're like thrusters are poot, poot, pooting, great, you're moving the ship. You need to align your thrusters so that you're all going in the same direction and moving the most quickly because otherwise it's opportunity cost and you're fighting against each other or just like slowly zigzagging your way there.

18:22So reorgs is something that we've done like twice a year. And I think that that is learning from things that aren't working or they're no longer working. Do you think that's kind of the secret sauce behind the success of Postman's community where you've been willing to continue innovating on the strategy you're using to actually build that community? I mean, we found product market fit so early on. If we had stuck with it, I think that would have been, we would have been dead in the water because some competitors would have come up and like eaten our lunch. I will say that the founders and the senior leadership being so malleable is helpful.

19:03And some of our community complains today, there's too much in Postman. Just do your one thing, stay in your hole and do the one thing really well. And we do have a lot of features. It's like an IDE. You know how to do like three things, five things, 10 things, but there's a thousand things you could do. And so one of the directives from our CEO is anything that you add, take something out. Stop just adding more things. Think really hard and then talk to at least 50 users that are using it before you've even come to me and propose it. That's really interesting. I like that approach of saying, okay, if we're going to extend the product, we also have to find something to cut.

19:41Because that's hard, particularly for a product that's been growing for years. You know, there's always someone who's using that feature and is like, no, you can't take that away. What are you doing? Oh, and you will hurt some feelings along the way, but you have to think about, like we're 20 million users now, you know? And think about all the millions that are starting every month. It's like, you have to make it easy. Otherwise your growth is really gonna flatten. Totally. I think it's also really interesting to look at some of the things Postman and your DevRel team in particular have done so successfully over the last couple of years to keep that growth going.

20:15And so we alluded at the top that we talked about TikTok a bunch or a bit at least. And I think that's an important place to jump in a bit and say, you know, you have never been afraid of jumping into a new platform, seeing what's there and trying to provide content and communication to users in your community. Increasingly, more and more companies are joining TikTok and viewing it as a place to leverage their content. But it's not just a place to get eyeballs. It's also a place where I see posts from a growing community. Connor, have you been on TikTok? I have an account. I don't post personally.

20:48Okay. I'll say that every channel is different and every platform that you go on is going to be different. So Twitter is going to be different than like Discord is going to be different than Discourse is going to be different than TikTok. And so for TikTok right now, we're just running a test where individuals who work at Postman have TikTok accounts that happen to have API or tech related stuff. My personal experience with TikTok is not Postman sponsored. People know I work at Postman. I've posted enough where I cover API centric things. But I think when I tweet something, I don't have a big following on Twitter.

21:23I have a bit much bigger following on TikTok. When I tweet something, I'll get like, especially now with the algorithm changing, I'll get like 300 views. Great. Like that's fantastic. But with TikTok, if your content is good, it can go much, much higher. And I think that's the thing where the current algorithm at TikTok rewards that. And so the reach, A, the reach is higher. And then B, the people are more engaging. So when I create content, a lot of times I'm learning as much from the comments as I am from preparing the TikTok I recorded. And so that's a really great way to get 50 or 100 comments about server-sent events or something like that, right?

22:04And it's really quick. And you get sentiment out of that too. Yeah, you mentioned listening to community. It's a great way to get in front of people who care and then hear what they have to say. Because maybe they have a complaint you didn't recognize, or maybe they have an extension to what you're doing that they recommend. I think that's an exciting piece of the puzzle for you. Is it mostly the DevRel team and like senior engineers for Postman who are participating in this? Or is it, you know, a broad swath of aspiring devs, junior devs? How are you kind of approaching that mix? From Postman, I think it's anybody who wants to be on TikTok chooses to be on TikTok on their own.

22:39as far as people who I find commenting on my TikToks. There's a lot of people that are thinking about getting into tech that are like just trying to find somebody to follow to educate themselves. But there's a lot of people that have a very deep experience. There's curmudgeonly like DevOps folks. There's very curmudgeonly people actually that are chiming in with their experiences. And I think that's what's very, very valuable. And a lot of times they're arguing with each other in the comments because it's another community platform. Do you think TikTok is a good place for someone to start a community today and say, let's focus on this channel?

23:14I've been asked several times about the ROI of TikTok. And I think with any of the social platforms, if you don't enjoy it to some extent or consume it, if you're not a consumer, it's going to be really hard for you to be successful as a creator. So just like Reddit, you can't just like create content and then just blast it out through Reddit. You'll get roasted, right? So you have to be a Redditor to like understand the etiquette, understand the culture and maybe become known as a commenter before you start blasting your content out there. And so for TikTok, the algorithm is really, really good now.

23:50So it does reward good content. But if you're like, you know, you can't keep your TikTok addiction at bay, it's not going to be good for you. Are there particular niches that you see developers going into as far as TikTok content? I'll tell you, Connor, my TikTok consumption is not super tech focused. I personally am not. It's very interesting to me that people watch my TikToks about tech because I'm not there to learn. I'm there for dances and like ASMR, like cleaning things. I'm all about cat videos and I'm a sucker for any of those videos where it's like, hey, we're going to go to a taco truck and try their tacos and then like talk about how great it is and tip them.