the power of community w/head of devrel, domitrius clerk

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Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. And so that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me social media at T D S N T D E S S E Y N. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store. Because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. All right. And what's going on? Y'all. What up? Got my boy. I mean, I listen, there's nobody here yet. So we could say the most profane shit ever. But I will tell you this. If there's somebody who probably like, the meatress is my spirit animal.

Like, the meatress is, I would say, I would say if there's an extraverted version of me, it's the I'm the introverted version. I that's there we go. That's it. That's it. I'm the introverted version of you. We're like, it's like when you look in a mirror and the mirror starts talking to a weird black mirror. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Except dongle all the like dark facial features, which is what my wife want. I want it. Ideally. So there we go. It's funny. Keep you. I'm going to keep you away from my wife. No, what's funny is you don't understand how long it took for me to get a beard like this.

Like I went through. I went through the strat phase. I went through the thing I want. Oh, I got pictures, brother. Oh, God, you have to start. Hello, y'all. Good morning. It's great to see y'all. Dev, it's good to see you. It's good to see you, brother. Say, hey, we'd love to hear from you. For those of you tuning in on TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, all this. We're literally on every single social media platform streaming right now, except Snapchat. But for those of you tuning in, guidance comes with 2.0. This is a Morning Show podcast networking event. The reason why I tell people to say, hey, is to engage to comment to network.

If you are watching and you are in the back lurking, you're doing it wrong. Say hey, we'd love to hear from you. The reason why I tell people to say hey is because I have a ton of people on this platform that network. And so if you are Joe, what's going on? Joe's on TikTok right now. I'm a buddy, Joe Laogee. But if you are on LinkedIn and you are watching, please comment because there are people that go through and network on the back of this. And that's really my goal. My goal for this show, my goal for unicorn finders, which is my show focus on founders and startups, is for you to network on the back of me.

I've been doing this for three years now. If you networked with every single person in the comments, all my speakers on guidance counselor 2.0 and all the founders on unicorn finders over the last three years, you'll be pretty connected. So say, hey, comment, even if you watch this in the future, there are people that found mentored mentees on this show, apprenticeships job so being engaged don't lurk in the background. Second off want to give a shout-out to that conference broken us up with the coffee beans for the show. It's the only conference that I know of that has coffee beans and I'm a big coffee fanatic so check that out also shout out mad cat coffee so I want to give it okay while that conference is the official coffee sponsor I'm gonna say that Clark if you watch this don't get mad mad cat coffee and Grand Rapids, Michigan is the shit.

I will tell you this, if you are a coffee fanatic, go to Madcap, they're not sponsoring the show. Madcap, I'm looking at you. They actually have a subscription to their coffee. They had like 15 different type of beans in their stores, unbelievable coffee. What's crazy is this dude's really about his coffee. We were at a conference together and we're like up at the, you know, the line to get the crap coffee that everywhere serves. And he's looking at it, he's like, yeah, I don't think I'm gonna get anything on to that. No, I don't. I literally have render at render. I literally left the hotel in drove to go get coffee every morning.

Literally the most teller thing you could have done. I'm I'm the most bougie bougie motherfucker there is. All right. So I want to give a shout out to everybody this morning. Also, I want to give a shout to my employer, going.io. We're doing some pretty cool shit. We'll talk about it. Basically, the other day, if you're a developer, a senior developer and you want jobs, part time, full time freelance, join the platform, tell you, you have a place to fill it out on the website that I sent you. do that because that's how I get paid actually. So please do that. Anyway, let's go check that out.

Get that man paid. Get that man paid. That's my balls. I just hear Devin the background go, that's my balls. JC, it's good to see you Zachary. It's good to see you. Kaitlyn Scott Dylan. It's good to see you all. Janique, it's great to see you. Let's see here Kevin. Kevin Kevin has a metal drummer and the kids caution. I love that. Jordan, it's good to see you. I logged in and heard extra version of Vertitive Taylor and I'm really fear this man. Matt's good to see you. Alice Gracie, you're rich too. Joe lurking in the sip. I love it. Richie, it's good to see you.

Mark, Christina, John, Jason, yes, Madcap, Richie's from that area. Chris, it's good to see you. And then PTs, coffee beans are nice too. What's PTs? Is that PTs? Man, Taylor can read, y'all. Kind of like third grade level, like short words. All All right, definitely run my mouth. Dom, let's get the people what they want. Who are you, what do you do? And then obviously we'll just go from there. Whoo, who am I? That is like such a deep question. I don't know if I can fit into this 30 minutes, but as of right now, professionally, I'm the head of developer relations at Clerk. We are easy authentication, drop in a component, and you're off to the races.

Other than that, I've been working in tech for like, I don't know, like eight years now, seven years. Check my LinkedIn, I'm unsure. Built it up from the ground, retail for 10 years before that bootcamp graduate career transition year all that fun. Good stuff and yeah, man. Um, I build communities. I've been building communities since I was like, I don't know, 13 and I would build like video game, like tournaments, community, like, oh, dude, like, if you would have told little kid me that like that was going to help my career one day, I would have left and spit right in your face. Um, but like it's, it's insane with the chin strap beard pre-chin strap.

This is like goatee, like just getting the first hairs on my chin, chinny, chin, chin. It was terrible. Like I said, dude, I got pictures for you. But yeah, man, like, I've kind of spent most of my career around community. I think that it's like, it's so funny that's like, everything has taken over, like with community growth. Like every company needs community, every, like literally, like, you know, we were talking about it before, before the show popped on like big reason. Like, done, you know, was excited about grabbing you was the fact that you were able to build community within the developer landscape and get that mind share.

I think that people are starting to realize, especially companies that it's good business to be able to gather people, and we'll get into how they do it wrong later. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So, oh, by the way, Dom is like 6'7", too, for the record. First time. And hold on, wait, before we go any further, this is a door, correct? Like right here is a door. This is a door. Okay. I don't know how many people I've met in real life. They're like, dude, I thought you were like five seven. You look like you're three foot six. I'm standing in a door frame. What more do I gotta do?

I don't know. I don't know. I think it's just. I am a giant though. Like when you find that you get to meet me and I'm quite big. I'm like six, three, six, four. I'm like six, four on a good day. Yeah. Yeah. You're a little taller than I am. When I wear like my really thick bottom vans, you know what I mean? Dude, I just bought some thick bottom converses. Like they can't talk dude. I think this is it for me. I have really bad feet so cotton so vans are just almost that's very Let's talk about community Dom. I mean a lot of people do it right a lot of people do it bad.

Yeah, you know Obviously, I think you made a really interesting point backstage about how I think more and more companies are looking for that moving forward Oh, yeah, I know your prodigy dev has done in my opinion a great job at cultivating community and obviously that's why you snagged them, but can you just talk about the importance of community and what people should keep in mind moving forward? Like, over the next five years of where this tech thing's heading. I'm gonna start right off the bat with the take that I need everyone to go back and implement immediately. Stop building your communities in Slack. It's not worth it.

I don't care if you use it for work already and it's just easy for you and you like message reminders. Get out of Slack for your community. It's not a community building tool. It's a business tool. It's a business communication tool. Is it just the look and feel like, do you have thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, like one of the worst things about Slack is that it's message history. I have to pay five, maybe it's eight, I don't know, inflation hit. Like you have to pay anywhere from five to $10 per user to get message history. Just to get message history. And like honestly, and dude, like in most communities, like that's the value is the message history.

Like especially for companies like, all right, end of the day. I say this to literally everywhere that I interview. Nobody wakes up in the morning, grabs their fresh, what was the coffee that you were talking about over there? Nobody grabs their madcap coffee, sits down at their computer, and goes into some companies discord to talk about their day. Like it's just a fact. Like, yeah, there could be one-off instances, there could be, you know, great conversations spur inside of your inside of your community, but like, they're staying in their own communities that are either open source or led by their friends. Like, that's where they hang out.

I didn't even think about that. So at the end of the day, when they come to your like, for Clark, for instance, right? Like, if you go into the Clark Discord, the best thing about it is that it's like, it's a it's a pool of knowledge from how many questions are asked in there, right? Like, Most companies are using forums still, right? Like Discords or any of these platforms that are kind of held in that structure of long form SEO structured forums. Big reason a lot of people complain about Discord, right? Is the fact that it's like, you have to join to be able to see the context.

But at the end of the day, all of the features that are built into Discord now allow you to also use the API if you ever want to surface. Like the next JS Discord friends, and just surface all of their threads as like onto a website, all of their forum threads. So now all of the questions that are asked are now SEO indexable, so people can find them and lead themselves into their Discord. And like once you find out the real goal of the thing that you're trying to do with your community, it's a lot easier to focus on those things. And so like you would ask me like, you know, what is building community like?

And the first thing I said was like, get off a Slack. I'm sorry. Message history. A, B, somebody can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that when you're an owner, when you're an admin of a Slack, you have access to all messages. You have access to, like, you are the top-down owner of all communication inside of that Slack. It's why businesses love it because they can basically spy in on what their employees are saying. And it's no longer like email that you have to worry about. It's like full conversations in Slack. And so like, you can't do that in Discord. You own your own identity.

Yeah, you don't own the messages that you post or, but like once you're in your DM, you're out of the server. You're no longer in the server. And then dude, like identity on that platform is still absolute ass. Like, you know, let's be honest. It's great for business communication. Like I use huddles all the time. I think it's getting better. Like I think Slack is like great for work. It's not great for community. Stop using it immediately, please. Number two, like you really have to start figuring out a lot of companies, especially that I've talked to. Their first thing is like, oh, I need a community hire, right?

Like I need a, I need somebody who can come in and get people excited about the product. That's not community, right? Like that's acquisition, that's awareness, that's growth of customers, right? Like community is something that you gather around, a common idea, you grow around this common idea like it's supposed to be kind of like a rising tide, right? Like that's the idea of community, right? And now you've got a lot of companies that are like, okay, how do we hide our sales pitch in our community, right? Like how do we extract like their immediate thoughts or like if we grow and every company talks about it this way, like, all right, well, like, let's get to if we're at a thousand, let's get to 2000 people.

That doesn't matter. 2000 people in your your Discord doesn't matter. If you've got five people of the, it's the same thing for all you dingles that get like fake followers or try to try to masking. It just doesn't make sense because if you've got, if I'm looking at your Twitter and you've got 40k followers and I'm looking at your last tweet and you've got 20 likes, what does it matter? You have not built relationships with any of those people. Go and look at, I've had a pretty successful career. I've built it off of like building really deep relationships with people. When you go to my followers, followers, it's a lot of like pretty like high value people to me.

They don't have to always be high value people in the space, high value people to me. You've seen me out at a conference. I'll literally talk four hours to anyone, because I really enjoy the shit. I enjoy the shit. It's it's it's I have to have to hide from Dom. That's so false. He was she was finding me. Don't let him lie to you guys. Don't let I mean, here's a deal, right? Like, I'm not saying everybody needs community, but I think talk about the people who are passionate about it, why that could maybe serve them down the road. About building community? Yeah, about building community.

Yeah. Yeah. Like. So it's like when I first started in tech, uh, that was like my selling point to get my own, but I think that's a lot of people who are passionate about it. That was like my selling point to get my front end jobs. Is that I would, I saw Dandu Leon. He's like literally my big brother, my mentor. He had brought me up from like being an absolute bum as a developer. He was my first CTO. We worked together at Red Queen. First job I've ever had. When I first like pitched to work for Red Queen, they had posted in a Slack that they were looking for a senior developer.

I was not a senior. I hadn't even had a job yet. But I DM'd him and I was like, hey, I know you're looking for a senior, but I can tell you right now, I'll bring you so much passion, so much hard work, and I'll build you a community. I'll start building a community around your tool. We'll start doing a meetup. I'll teach people stuff, whatever. They bought into it. They brought me in, gave me my first chance at a job. And basically every job I had had since then, except for even Comcast was built from the communities I had built while at Red Queen.

And so I built a meetup called Arcee React, where we did workshops. I taught workshops monthly for a handful of months. That led me to getting nominated for a Technically Award, which is like the local publication for a test. I then moved on to React to Delphi which is where most people know me from in the beginning of my career. That's how I built who I am as a professional, whatever that is. And so I built React to Delphi. I mean we had like 70 to 100 people coming a month. We were the first people to do live stream twitch meetups because I wanted everyone to be able to access it.

It was pre-pandemic. It was awesome. It was so much fun. Built my career from then on I'd went to work on at Comcast as a contractor for like eight months And then Jason Langstorff hit me up and was like dude Why are you not getting paid to do the things that you're good at like become a developer advocate? You're already good at building community like get in there for me building community did a few things it it exposes me to different ideas like Especially when you do a meetup meetups are really easy ways to build community because it's it's less focused on on you needing to actionably do so.

Like if you're just building a community like from scratch, what's the action? Like what are people, what's the funnel, how do people get there, why do people care about coming there? Like usually a React community pops up because React developers want to be together, right? Like it all has a focal point. Meetups are easy because you're like, we're gonna have talks or workshops and people are gonna come and watch us talk to them. And then we're gonna chat in person and have a good time, right? Easy way to get started. If you are looking to like my big and you at the beginning you're like hey everybody like make sure you say something make sure you comment like You're gonna be a lurker in most of the communities that you're in like it's just a fact you're gonna come in You're gonna lurk you want to see it, you know what it's like feel it out Eventually you're gonna get involved start paying attention to like what other places are doing wrong and what they're doing well Like because it it you'll see really quickly who is trying to provide value and who is trying to set value from you.

And like a lot of the time like company communities, like they're at the end of the day, they're trying to set value from you. Like they're doing things like even when you do stuff like early access, right? Like you're giving people betas, you're having about, they're basically your QA at this point. Like they're QAing for you. Yeah, you're going to send them some swag. Yeah, you're going to give them a shout out. But like they're providing more value for you than you are probably didn't body for that in the gun.io we use slack Is is we actually literally have a what is it is a functionality group?

We're at no feedback We're literally our entire community gives feedback on our app. Yeah. Yeah, and like and like I think it's great to have Transparency especially when you're not an open source platform like especially in the dev tool space like I've worked only in the dev tool space since getting into dev advocacy. And it's one of those things where the faster you can open source everything but your platform, the better your platform will become because you are going to get real feedback from people. Not all feedback is good feedback. People who aren't paying for the thing yet aren't always going to give you the best feedback.

They're always going to give you feedback based on their very specific scenario. But it's like without building community well, you're always going to find yourself, especially at a company, struggling to build numbers because you're always going to be worried about the wrong scale that you're tipping. You really need to be worried about like starting first, how do I make my community safe? Secondly, how do I make sure I'm providing the community value? Third, how do I make sure that I am always available when something goes wrong or somebody is available when something goes wrong? There's an idea of this thing called call the missing stare, Google it if you've never heard of it, but basically the idea of the missing stare is that somebody can be non aggressive, they don't, it's not like they have to be an asshole.

But they always say some shit that makes the conversation weird, right? Like, like they always make a comment or they always have to disagree with someone and it kind of just like flat lines the conversation almost every time. That needs to be moderated. Like that needs to be publicly, hey, stop doing this. Like other people need to see. Stop being weird. Stop being weird. You're being weird. And you probably be this weird in person, stop doing that. But like if you don't, if you don't, if you're not looking at those things, if you're not paying attention to those things, cause you're not as active. And you have to be the activity of your community.

Nobody's gonna give a shit about it until you get a shit about it. Kevin goes, I see it now, the extroverted Taylor. Told you all. True. Want to give a shot real quick Shonday. What up girl. That's my girl. I Love you so much. I love you so much. No, I love you more. I love you way more And then I want to give a shout out to Also Lawrence Lawrence's birthday was I think this week or last week That is a great a 10 out of 10 human right there. Yeah, everybody go connect with Lawrence on Twitter He's he's a stud. Love you dude.

Oh Let's see here. That's all Wendy said. Thoughts on teams. I'll be honest with you. I've never used teams on. I don't think so. I've only ever used Slack. It's the same idea. We use so we use teams at Vaco. I will give teams two props. One, I think the DM feature is great. Sure. It's like front and center. You can see it's just a little easier to use. I'd rather use teams than have to email you back and forth on the outlet. Yeah, and that's the whole goal. And then I do like the quick like call feature on teams, but other than that, but it's like don't use it for community Like that no, it's it's I haven't used it, but I can tell you right now.

It's gonna have the same Problematic pieces, you know, I don't know if it lets you like read DMs and stuff But you want to you want to first of all if you're especially if you're building developer communities like Like yeah, there's gonna be there's gonna be people who want slack stuff But like you're going to want to move to where they are which is discord It's just a fact. Hey, Sean, but you have to pick one of us though. You got to pick one of us. That's rude. I won't make you pick one of us. You know what I mean? But you were saying backstage that you think that companies are just going to probably start hiring people, or maybe just put more emphasis on hiring people if they can bring community to the organization.

Because that's what you said backstage, right? OK. Yeah, I think now. So I went through a role at Netlify, where I kind of defined it myself. They just killed the Jamstack basically, but it's like they brought me in to help like with the Jamstack ecosystem. And so I like, I've titled myself Jamstack Community Engineer. I told them like, I can be a community builder, but like these people need to understand that I'm one of them. It's a lot easier for me to build a community with people. And this is like even for content, this is for anything. If people don't trust me, They're not gonna trust this company.

Like people will use clerk because I work here. Like they're much more interested in dealing with me. It was the same way when I was back at like, it's downhill. Let's unpack that for a second. Unpack that, no, I see you're kind of like a twin second. Let's unpack that about people buying from people. I've been so loud about that for the last minute. Yeah. I mean, like, this is where developer advocacy gets, it's really bad name. I'm looking at all of you. And you can call me out, you can hit my DMs if you got a problem with this. Most developer advocates are egotistical maniacs.

They have gotten themselves into a career where building their ego is a part of the job. Getting people to come out to your talks, your YouTube videos, your live streams. Like that is the world, the content creation world that we live in is ego building, right? It is a reality. And so the people that do best, in my opinion, or the people that I care about the most, are the people that I know do this and still keep their ego in check. I still meet with them. And they're still the same person when I chat with them. Like Jason Langstorff gave me really funny advice really early in my career, right?

It was, if you're an asshole, no matter how you act online, no matter how nice you are, eventually, people are gonna find out that you're an asshole. And so like, you know, for me, and this goes all the way back to when I was in retail, and retail do people used to bring me full lunches, like customers, they'd bring their family, they'd be like, Dom, we just wanted to drop this off of you, we were in the mall, I loved that. Because it's like, that's like a real connection. That's like, that's like me building a relationship with these customers that are like one offs. I'm only ever talking to them one time.

I handle developer having the same way. Like, no matter how big I ever get, no matter how much I want to grow as a professional, and I want people to believe me. At the end of the day, like, people don't give a shit what I'm doing. Like, people are worried about their own thing. People are, you know what I mean? They're trying to, they're only ever needing to interact with me for a thing that they need, right? Like a lot of the time. And so I think learning how to be more giving and understanding that you are the connection between community and product. And developer advocacy, community building, you are the pipeline from one to the other both ways.

Like, you are doing all of the work in which is needed to be done to gather community sentiment, to gather real user feedback, and also go back to your company, and what can I pull from them? Can I get an answer about when this feature is coming out that they wouldn't tell somebody else? Can I can I you know peek into the engineering roadmap and see if I can slide in a thing like and then when I do that Do I go and and report that back to the to the community? That's how you build community build trust you build a two-way street of communication and People trust you to make the right decisions for them sometimes and you know what dude?

There's a guy. I don't know if you know his name's Natter Dabbit He went into like deep into the web three world. So we kind of walk away from each other. But one of the biggest inspirations for me because he was working at AWS. And at AWS, everyone shills. Like it's, you know what I mean? Like they live and breed it cause they're getting paid some damn money to live and breed it, right? But at the end of the day, this guy will be like, I don't think that this product that I'm shilling to you is right for you. You should use this other product because it's right for you.

It's right for the scenario that you're telling me. If Clerk isn't right for you, if we're talking and you're like, yeah, I really only need the subset of features and I don't know if I can pivot. Yeah, let's find you a solution that works. Like, let's go and check out the rest of them, right? Like, let's go and it doesn't always have to be my product that wins for you. It's me that wins for you. And then you're gonna come back to me because you're gonna trust me because I gave you the reality. I love having you on. I don't have to ask a fucking question.

This is great. Scott, I want to get to this. It's a lot to be constantly giving to maintain foster and grow community. How do you build a network of folks who can help you so you're not shouldering that burden on your own? Yeah, I think this is tough. I think all of like creation, community, content, like developer advocacy, it's It's like the most burnout driven role because it's so forward facing. And me and Taylor were just talking about this backstage. Like you don't realize you're burning out until you are fully burnt. Facts. And so how do you build the network of folks? Love on them.

Be genuine. Like, you know what I mean? Like ask for help. When you build a community, right? Like say you just you spin up a discord and again I'm going to beat on like you spin up a reactus for it, right? Three people join. First of all, those three people are the first people to give a shit about what you're doing. They already, they already give a shit more than, than you need them to build a relationship with those people. Like, you don't know how many times during my meetup people will come to me and be like, go, if you ever need extra hands, like, let me know people want the opportunity to be a part of something growing, even if it's not to grow, even if your, your whole idea is like, I just want to have 20 people that give a shit about the thing that I do, Right.

If you are looking at it as a like a growth tactic, you're always going to suffer to be honest with you. So I think what you needed to do is take a step back and really again like safety, do you bring value? And once you bring value, build relationships with the people to give a shit about what you're doing. Yeah. Yeah. Again, in my opinion, I'm not saying this because he's on the show. I think I think Dom is one of the goats when it comes to community building. And it's so true. Listen, I mean, I'll catch you right on that forehead. Yeah, yeah, you will big forehead.

Um, you know, it's just like right here to me. Yeah. Now it's one of these things where, and listen, I get caught up in it, right? The followers, the likes, the data dopamine hit, baby. That's what you told me. But the other day, if like the people who are commenting today, like you all my people, yeah, like you all my people, like everybody who's commented today, I, I've and tell him he will chase you down if you ever had a conference together and give you that big, I'll tell you what, one of the best embraces I've gotten at a conference was this guy already. It was a good brace.

It was a good brace. So yeah, again, I mean, if it's four people, but here's the deal, you don't always need to start something. I wanna say that, because I know we're talking about building a community, I think it's important, but if you just want to give back to a community, like listen, I have a Discord, I'd love help. If you're interested in helping more, shoot me DM. That's how you learn how to build communities. Yeah, like I can't do it all. of one of y'all want to be a damn moderator in my discord and please. Let's talk, right? Yeah, like let's talk about it.

So I think there's so much opportunity to get plugged into communities. You know, my guy Noah, he commented like, what are the best communities? Noah, first off, check out my Notion page. I literally have communities on there, but James Quicks got one. Danny Thompson's got one. James Quicks, I heard James Quicks pops off. I'm not a member, I probably should just lurk in his, but like his is Danny's popping off. Mine's actually gotten pretty big. We're about 600 at this point. So like again, like just get a part of something and start giving back. Let's see, you're a lot of comments coming in here. Good morning, Mariska.

It's cheap. I love answering questions. Oh, it's here. Y'all are my people too. I love it. Matt comes in. I've struggled with content creation for a long time. I think just focusing on putting forth my interest. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. I talk about ISOC. You're going to see a lot of content for me over the next few days for ISOC. We're playing in a big tournament this weekend, right? Like just talk about what your interests are like and that's the thing like if you love cheese Wait, I'm about to blow people's minds brother. Oh here we go content is community building brother like Do the farm Dom Dom and I would chat back say you know I know you brought a farm.

We talked about farm stuff like like Okay, even even influencer marketing even influencer marketing. Let's take a full step back right like that's that's kind of where of DevRel is going and it's absolute dog shit. But influencer marketing is this idea that somebody has built a following, such a large following that you want to tap into their following to get things, right? So brands, brand deals, that's because they think if they're wearing the Adidas sweatshirt, people are going to go out and buy the Adidas sweatshirt, it's a proven tactic. It works. If you look into the comments of even big names, of even the biggest influencers, and they have a social media team for this now, but they're answering comments.

They're chatting with their commenters. They're building community, all the video game streamers. Every big video game streamer that exists has their own discord because it doesn't stop at the creation. People have to get to know you. They have to get to know what you're about. They have to believe in you, trust in you, because again, they trust in you. And when you make a decision, they are much more likely to trust that you're making the right decisions for them too. Now, can that be used to manipulate? Hell yeah. And that's why you have to be really worried about when you join a community. Know who's running it.

Know the type of people that are running it. You're gonna see really quickly what slides through the cracks for people who don't know how to maintain a community properly. 100%. Lawrence comes in with a good question. We'll wrap up here in a minute or two. How can I see push back on a company when the company is getting community all wrong? Yeah. That's a bomb. Um, don't hire me. I'll tell you that. That's great. Go hire me. Go hire the Metrias Clark. Cause I'll tell you right now, dude, I'm going to be in your messages. In your shit. I'm going to be telling you this stuff like, and listen, like fire me, fire me.

Because dude, at this point, I don't want to work somewhere that doesn't on endless, I understand like I'm being like, you know, brash, I get it. Not everybody can just quit their job because of an idea. Like I totally can empathize with that. But I mean it when I passionately say like that is going to continue into many other things. Number one, number two, I wanna answer this directly. How can I see push back on the company? First of all, you have to be able to understand what is all wrong and how to describe that in a way that they're gonna care about. I spent a long time over the last two years at both the roles that I've been in.

trying to sell the idea that nobody wants to hear, which is that as a company, we want value, I get it. We have to provide value way before anybody is willing to give us value back. So like, whether that be events, whether that be us doing workshops, like when you work in an engineering company and you've got all of your engineers that are smart is all hell, right? How do you get them to come and teach your community something, right? Like how do you get them to come and talk about their work and build a relationship so that they could possibly answer questions for them at some point.

Like that's getting value, right? Find that way to start building the value immediately. And then also, I use Orbit because to me, growth isn't as important as engagement. Growth is cool. Engagement is how building happens. Not as important as engagement. I'd rather have 50 people with 50 people talking than 3,000 people with 50 people. Richie, hold on real quick, Richie. Good news. If you don't have, you don't have to quit a job. Eventually, they'll just run out of money. Exactly. And dude, and here's a problem, right? Like a lot of DevRels are getting laid off right now because what is happening is DevRel teams haven't done a good job at exposing the true value of DevRel to the business.

And this is where you have to start tracking engagement and where engagement leads. So Orbit is a platform that basically tracks across all of your platforms. It can do like Twitter, YouTube, Discord, and it creates an identity for somebody. So say I start your repo, I joined, I liked your LinkedIn page, and I joined your community. It now knows all of those things that I have done, and shows the types of interactions that I have, so that I can then go and be like, oh, this person is extremely involved. Let me go and chat with them and make sure that they feel welcomed in the community.

You just have to find a way to provide the reality of the business value that you want the community to have Love that also Lawrence Start something model it That's what I would say. Yeah people they have to know the value who doesn't either understand community is doing it wrong Doesn't want community for the wrong reasons and you have to figure out what that reason is correct And I would set the example and just start something small and again I tell people this like you know, I have a ton of passions I love F1. I was thinking about doing a meetup where we get a bunch of IT people together, watch F1, right?

I love why. Let's get a watch. So again, like just do stuff around your interest. Another question comes in again, we're going to wrap up. So any more questions, please ask them. This comes from Thomas. He started to troubles staying consistent with ideas. What are your thoughts on this? your problem is you're looking at everybody else. You're looking at all the success that everyone's having and how consistent they all are, and it makes you taper off, and then you have work, and you're like, Dan, like, I just spent eight hours today working, like, do I really want to go and create this content? First and foremost, block out the rest.

Most of the people that are successful, you didn't watch them struggle. You didn't watch how long it took them. you think, again, like, you know, how do I know this, but in my opinion, you think that people have done overnight successes, and that's just not true. Almost every big creator that I know is a, you know, but I'm big in the gaming and streaming space. So like I've watched a lot of these bums who had like 10 viewers forever who are now up at like a thousand. It's because they stay consistent. How do you stay consistent? You got to figure that out for yourself. You got to publish.

Like, but like you're, you're probably worried too much about what people will think about your content. You know, and that's a fair feeling. It's not something that you can just get rid of and wake up one day and you're, and you're, you're all to the races. Yeah. But like, you have to struggle with getting no views, getting nobody interacting with your content and still coming back and, and building and building and building and building. I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, and Thomas True Story, LinkedIn's done something with their algorithm again. Like my engagement is shit right now. Like, absolute shit. And so like, for me, I'm kind of like, I'm just gonna I'm just gonna take a break.

I'm gonna stop posting. No, you just keep going man. Just keep going one person One person needs to resonate with your content. I'll tell you this time. It's after washing you from afar. I resonate with your shit So keep posting Another one we've obviously struck record here. Hope you didn't have a hard stop. I have I have time It's really it's yeah, I got another eight minutes we can go to Because because I got to do some things before my next podcast. I'm doing how do you balance not burning out your audience? while trying to keep them engaged, kind of what I'm doing with too, but yeah, I'm curious to your thoughts, Dom.

How do you balance operating out your audience while trying to think about it? I think this is where it's funny where I said content is community, right? Build content around the people that you're involved with in these communities, right? Like if you are in a community, again, I'm going to keep beating on the React stick. Like you're in a React community and people keep asking the same types of questions, put out a video on that, right? Like you're then close to the people that you are, you are trying to serve. So you get a lot better of a feedback loop. And you also can see like if it succeeds or not, you're probably always going to burn out.

I'm sorry to say that, but like I think we need to be real about content for a second. Like you're on the internet all the time, all the time, for especially in this like industry, like you're always on your phone, you're always on the internet. We live in a society of burnout. It's just a fact. We have too much screen time. I'm the worst with it. So I'm preaching to myself. You're always gonna burnout. It's realizing the signs. It's getting support from the people around you that care about you, your friends, your family, and being honest with them about your struggles. And also like being real with yourself and being like, I'm burnt and I need to take a break.

I need to take a step back. Like you're gonna constantly be in a state roller coaster ride. And learning how to ride that better is going to be really your best strength. 100%. Awesome. Alright, rapid fire. Last three questions. I'm ready. What brings you joy outside of work? I'm a gamer brother. What's I be playing? I be playing mad video games like an obscene amount of video. Like, like what's like what's the one you're playing a lot of right now? I mean, dude, I'll play like I play a lot. So like I think my friends are like really my staple in life. Like every girl I've ever been with, every person in my life knows that like my friends keep me grounded and have through really, really terrible times, like family to me.

And so like I'll play whatever they're playing. Honestly, as long as like my homies are playing, like I mean, I will play with them. I love that. But yeah, that brings me a lot of joy. And I love it. I love that second question. What tools, technologies, trends are you either tinkering with or watching right now? I mean, I keep pretty heavily tapped into like the streaming world and it's an absolute mess and a disappointment right now. So it's actually really depressing to talk about. But I think, you know, keeping your eye on the, on disc, like learning discord, all of you that are in communities, I see it all the time.

Like, oh, dude, like I've got 70 million communities and I just don't know what to do. There's so many ways you can deal with the overwhelm of notification discord. You just never have taken the time. Discord actually has this really crazy help forum that they've put up where it has like how to use Discord from scratch. I think going and doing that would help a lot of you. I truly like, we're talking about community. Discord is my choice there. Last question, what career advice would you give younger Dom? Shh. Stay transparent as all hell, dude. Like one of the coolest things about my success for me has been I have kept it 100% in every conversation I've ever had with CEOs, with hiring managers, with recruiters.

I've kept it a bean with every single one. And it has served me in keeping me away from really bad opportunities and connecting me with really awesome people. I was just staying like 100% true to myself what I know I need and being able to like actively communicate that. Like so working on my communication skills because like I'm a very abrasive person. So like I've had to learn how to still keep a lot of my transparency while taming the way in which I deliver everything, especially in those scenarios. So I would just say to keep it real, keep it 100 with everyone. And like, dude, like, you're not just retail, man.

Like just because you didn't go to college, it doesn't mean anything. Like, you know, I believed in myself. And I think that was like, it changed everything for me. Like I quit my job in retail, went to a boot camp, spent a year struggling teaching myself code. Like it was one of the hardest things that I've ever done. But I kept believing in myself the entire time and going for chances that were way far out of my league and every time it kind of connected for me. I love that. Awesome, well y'all, I hope you enjoyed today. I'm judging based off the amount of comments and the engagement I think y'all did.

Please go connect with Demetrius. Demetrius, we're the best place people can connect with you at. Honestly, dude, don't connect with me. I see notifications on LinkedIn. I hate this platform, really, I really do. It's honestly, I spent a lot of time on it in my early career and it did a lot of work for me. I think now deeper in my career is where I find less value. The building your value on LinkedIn is great. Connect with me. I just want to answer you. I'm really terrible there. You ever want to chat though? Twitter. Just go through Twitter. X, whatever the hell it's called now, whatever platform it becomes.

I think I'm going to call it Twitter for a very long time. Yeah, I most likely will as well. Find me on Twitter. Send me DM. Honestly, I have ADHD. Just be patient with me. I forget that people DM me all the time. I get a ton of like messages that I don't remember to answer. It is not personal. I love y'all. Reach out. Like I'm here for y'all and especially if you want to build community. I got some advice. I love it. Awesome. Y'all tomorrow. Extreme excited. We got Homer Gaines. Homer Gaines. We got a hell of a week this week. That's my boy.

He was also in Philly. That's a home where Homer's amazing. I mean, I think we got Lawrence on the show coming up, right? Lawrence. So again, y'all have a great one tomorrow morning. not 30 am central. You won't want to miss Homer as well. And keep it locked in, baby. You have a great day. I love you. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode. And I am very grateful. Because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes and I myself rarely finished an entire episode. So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store.

I want this to be discoverable to others and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it. Please, like, right now. Unless you're driving, then don't do it. So, thank you again. If you need to reach out to me at Tdastin on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.