DevRel before it had a name
Three lines of Python. That’s all it took to send an SMS with Twilio.
I saw this demo and immediately integrated their API into one of 9h37’s products. No sales call, no enterprise negotiation. Just docs, code, and a working product in an afternoon.
That moment changed how I thought about marketing technical products.
Rob Specter at Twilio was doing something different. He wasn’t selling—he was teaching. Writing code on stage, sharing projects, speaking the same language as his users. Developers trusted him because he was one of them.
I wanted to bring this to France.
When I met the Mailjet founders, I pitched them on building a Developer Relations program from scratch. Dev-first marketing. Meet developers where they are—at meetups, hackathons, in their GitHub issues. Help them succeed. Trust that the product sells itself when it works.
We called it “Developer Evangelism” back then. The term felt right—part technical, part missionary. You believed in your product enough to preach it. “DevRel” came later, when the practice matured and companies started building whole teams around it. But in 2013, we were just figuring it out.
We were early. “Developer Evangelist” wasn’t a job title in French SaaS yet. People thought we were doing support, or maybe PR. We were doing neither. We were building trust with the people who actually decide what tools get used.
The core insight still holds: your real customer is the developer. They choose your API. They build with it. They convince their company to pay for it. And if your product creates friction, they’ll rebuild it themselves over a weekend—or think they can.
Respect developers. Build for them. Let them be your marketing.