We had 400 developers signing up for our API every month and a docs site nobody finished reading. My instinct was to hire a DevRel lead to fix it. That would have been the fastest way to burn a salary on someone reinventing a motion that didn't exist yet.
If developers are your buyers or your buyers' first stop, DevRel eventually matters. But hiring for it before you've run the motion yourself just moves the learning curve onto someone else's paycheck. Here's what I built myself first, and the checklist I'd run again before writing that job post.
Why an Early DevRel Hire Usually Fails
A DevRel hire's job is to systematize something that already works: content that developers trust, a support motion that answers questions fast, and a community that has opinions about your product. If none of that exists yet, you're not hiring a systematizer. You're hiring someone to invent a motion from zero, without your context, your credibility with early users, or your read on which technical questions actually block adoption.
Developers can also tell the difference between a founder answering their integration question at 11pm and a hired advocate reciting talking points. The former builds trust fast. The latter, done too early, can read as a company performing developer-friendliness instead of practicing it.
The Founder-Led Checklist to Run Before You Hire
1. Get time-to-first-success under 5 minutes
Instrument the gap between signup and a developer's first successful API call. If that number is over 15 minutes, no amount of content or community will fix your adoption problem — you're marketing a product that isn't ready for outside advocacy yet. We tracked this in a spreadsheet before we had any real analytics: timestamp of key creation, timestamp of first 200 response. Getting that from 40 minutes to under 5 did more for signups than any blog post we wrote.
2. Answer every developer question yourself for 90 days
Sit in your Discord, Slack, or support inbox and answer questions personally for a full quarter. Keep a running log of which questions repeat. That log is your future documentation table of contents, your FAQ, and your onboarding email sequence — written by demand, not by guessing what developers might want to know.
3. Ship three pieces of content yourself before you outsource any
Write a real quickstart that gets someone to a working call in under 10 minutes. Write one deep technical post that solves a specific integration problem you watched multiple developers hit. Write one honest migration or comparison guide for the tool developers are switching from. If you can't write these three yourself, a hire won't know what to write either — they'll need your product intuition first, and that only transfers through you doing the work once.
4. Find your first three superusers
Look for the developers answering other people's questions in your community before you do. Those three people are worth more to your DevRel motion than a hire's entire first quarter — they're proof the product earns advocacy on its own. Reach out personally, get on a call, ask what would make them recommend you unprompted.
The Signal That Tells You It's Time to Hire
Stop guessing and watch three numbers. You're spending 10+ hours a week on developer support and content that could go to product. Your question log has stopped producing new categories — you're answering the same handful of things on repeat, which means the content backlog is a solved problem, not a discovery problem. And your time-to-first-success and superuser count are both trending the right direction without your daily involvement. When all three are true, you have a motion worth systematizing, not just an idea worth funding.
Who to Hire First
Not a conference-circuit evangelist and not a community manager whose job is running events. Your first DevRel hire should be a generalist who can code well enough to write real sample apps, write well enough to run your docs and blog, and talk to developers without sounding like marketing wrote their lines. Their job in month one is not to invent a new motion — it's to take everything in your question log, your three pieces of content, and your superuser relationships, and turn it into something that scales past you.
If you hire before that handoff is possible, you're paying someone a full salary to relearn what you already know. Run the checklist yourself first. The founder who has personally answered 200 developer questions writes a better job description — and interviews a much sharper candidate — than the one who's hiring to make the problem go away.