You can tell a lot about a person by their choice of Slack emoji. Is :thumbsup: your go to, or do you always bring the :congapartyparrot: energy?

For many teams and communities, custom Slack emoji have become an integral part of a group’s online culture, and that’s true for the Orbit team as well.

As part of our series on DevRel workflows (

 to make the bots and alerts really pop. Shoutout to 

We think they’re super fun (especially StarBot and SwagBot), so we’d thought we’d make them available for the community to use in their own Slack channels. 

If you’d like a little Orbit energy in your own Slack, you can 

Here are the names we use to summon our custom emoji:

If you need help adding custom emoji to your Slack workspace, 

If you decide to use these sweet icons, please just give us a shout on twitter 

 to let us know. Bonus points for screenshots!

Join us in orbit with these spacey custom emoji for your Slack. 

Download these Orbit Model icons for your Slack workspace

Whether it’s stickers, t-shirts, and socks, or donations, sponsorships, and carbon offsets, community members always appreciate being recognized for their contribution.

But outside of events where everyone gets the same bag-o-swag, most teams struggle with managing the end-to-end process from recognition to delivery.

You might’ve asked yourself questions like “Have we missed any key community contributions this week?” and “Did we actually send that person swag or did we forget?” And the back-and-forth of getting someone’s mailing address or t-shirt size can be a real pain.

Fortunately, there are ways to automate parts of the swag management process so you can focus on identifying fans and ambassadors, and increase the Love across your orbits.

In this blog post, I’ll show you step-by-step how to send a swag collection form to someone who makes a helpful comment in your community Slack.

How to get a Slack notification when someone stars your GitHub repository

, we’ll be using Zapier in conjunction with Slack.

Here’s the high-level flow we’ll build in this tutorial:

You or someone on your team stars a message in your community Slack.

The details of that message are stored in Airtable.

Each message is reviewed by you and approved by checking a checkbox labeled “Send Swag Bot”.

A message is triggered to the author of the starred message with a link to an Airtable form to gather size and mailing information.

The information from the Airtable form is saved inside a table where you can review.

This flow requires two separate Zaps, both of which we’ll cover below.

Step 1 - Create an Airtable base called Swag Management

This base will store every message you star in Slack, and provide a form for gathering and storing swag size and shipping info.

To go along with this tutorial, we’ve created an Airtable base template that has all of the tables and columns you’ll need. 

The base has 2 tables and each table has multiple views.

. This grid view shows every message you star in Slack.

You’ll notice a checkbox column called 

. Clicking that will add the record to the second view in the 

This view lists all responses from the form in the table’s second view, called 

 when users visit it. Of course, you can customize to your needs with your own branding and copy.

Zapier calls its workflows zaps. Click the orange 

At the next screen, under “Choose App & Event”, search for 

Click on Slack. Once the dialog refreshes, open the 

If you haven’t done this yet, expand the 

. You will go through an authentication flow in a new window, and you will need to grant Zapier the permissions that it needs.

With your account connected, you’ll have the chance to test the data Zapier gets back from Slack.

❗ Before you test, go to the Slack account you connected, and star one of your recent messages. This will simplify the testing of this Zap.

, then review the data to find your recently starred message.

. Choose or configure your Airtable account similar to how setup Slack in the prior step. Again, click 

In the previous step, we set up a trigger that watches for starred messages in the account we selected. In this step, we’ll save details of that message to the Airtable we created in Step 1.

You should see rows here for each column of your table. To populate each row with data from your starred Slack messaged, click the + icon at the right end of each row, then search for the relevant mapping.

See the image below for mapping. The only empty field should be Send Swag Bot.

Then open your Airtable. If everything worked, you should see a row populated with the test data pulled from Slack.

 at the bottom of your Zapier flow. You should now get a message about turning the zap on. Click the button and it should change from grey to green.

If you haven’t named your zap yet, you should give it a memorable name like, 

Great work! You’re now tracking starred messages from Slack in your Airtable base. In the next section, we’ll use that data to trigger a swag bot in Slack, which will reach out to relevant community members to gather their swag info.

In this example, we’ll collect t-shirt preferences and mailing info, but this process can be customized for any kind of swag or information.

 button in the header to create one. We’ll now connect your Airtable back to Slack.

Under “Choose App & Event”, search for and select Airtable.

. Next, you’ll need to select your Airtable account and click

In the Customize Record dialog, select the 

You might remember that the Swagbot Sent view only shows records for which you or your team checked the Send Swagbot checkbox.

In other words, clicking that checkbox in the All Starred Messages will trigger the actions in the nexts step.

❗ Before you continue, go to the Airtable and check Send Swagbot for one of your records. Be sure that the record you select includes your username. Otherwise you won’t be able to test the integration later.

Under Find Data, select a recent record and click 

 beneath the Airtable step and search for Slack. Choose Slack and choose 

 and select the Slack account you want to use. It should be the same one you used in prior steps. Again, click 

. This is where we configure how the message to Slack looks and what data goes inside of it. There are a lot of options, so we’ll go through the important ones step-by-step.

. This will let you DM the user reference in your spreadsheet.

 - add the Username field from your Airtable.

- you can name it whatever you want, but we like SwagBot.

 and add it as a custom icon called :orbit-swagbot:.

 -  In this textbox, you will build the contents of the message you’d like to send, including variables. In our example, we reference the channel where the notable comment occurred.

Example Screenshot

Here's text you can copy and paste, just delete the double braces and add the corresponding variables there.

Once you have all the fields like you want, click the big blue 

 button again. Then open your Slack application and click 

You should receive a message in your Slackbot channel that looks something like this:

Star a message in your community Slack to kick off a flow that collects swag info from a helpful developer.

How to use Slack and Airtable to easily collect swag information

Many in the developer community view GitHub star counts as proxies for a project's success or popularity. Sure, the counts are interesting, but for maintainers and project leaders it can also be helpful to know more about the individual developers behind the button clicks. Are they fellow contributors or maintainers? What other technologies are they using?

If your goal is increasing project adoption, these clues can help you find the folks who could become strong future collaborators and advocates. 

With the right nurturing, they might become committers or authors of blog posts and talks—a.k.a. 

 in the Orbit Model—and attract new contributors to the project.

In this blog post, I’ll show you step-by-step how to send notifications to a Slack channel when someone stars ⭐ to one of your GitHub repositories.

 workflow automation platform to do this. The Zapier free plan only allows zaps with 2 steps and checking intervals of 15 minutes. We’ll need 3 steps in our zap, which means being on a paid Zapier plan is eventually required. However, you can 

 to sign up for a new Zapier account. You'll also need a GitHub and Slack account.

At the next screen, under “Choose App & Event”, search for GitHub.

Click on GitHub. Once the dialog refreshes, open the 

. Next, you’ll need to connect your GitHub account. If you haven’t done this yet, expand the 

. You will go through an authentication flow with GitHub in a new window, and you will need to grant Zapier the permissions that it needs.

 a second time. Now, you’ll need to choose the specific repository you’d like to get notifications for. Expand the 

 dropdown to see all of the choices you have. Depending on the GitHub organizations you authorized in the previous step, you will see all the repositories you own or have access to.

Choose a repository from the list and click 

 Before you test, go to that repository on GitHub and give it a star.

 If you’ve already starred it, you can unstar and star again. This just makes the next steps easier, as the most recent event against the repository will be a WatchEvent, the one we’re going to filter for in the next step.

. This will verify the GitHub connection.

In the previous step, we set up a trigger that watches all events on the repository we selected. In this example, we just want to be notified about new stars. Thankfully, Zapier has an app called 

 that lets us conditionally continue based on the results of the previous step, like an if/else statement.

The GitHub API documentation contains the full list of 

 looks like it would work for our purposes, in my testing only 

. You will see a message about whether the filter applied to the test event found in the last step. It’s okay whether it didn’t or not. Click the 

 beneath the filter step and search for Slack. Choose Slack and choose 

. Choose or configure your Slack account similar to how you did GitHub before. Again, click 

 - Choose the Slack channel where you’d like Zapier to send the Slack message.

 - In this textbox, you will build the contents of the message you’d like to send, including variables. Here’s a basic example that includes the user and repository names.

 are variables that came from Step 1 in the zap. Insert variables by clicking the 

 icon in the top-right hand corner. Why is 

 repeated twice? It’s because we’re creating a link that can be clicked and expanded within Slack. The link expansion will automatically show us the avatar and bio of the user who starred the repo.

To learn more about Slack message formatting options with Zapier, check out the 

You can change the name of the bot that the message will come from, to something fun like 

: You can also change the avatar of the bot. If you want this to be the avatar of the GitHub user, you can set it to the 

If you’d like to use the StarBot icon from our demo, 

 if you’d like link previews. This can be used to create previews for both GitHub users and repositories based on the URLs you have in the message text, but beware that more than one preview per Slack message can get a little noisy.

Check the channel you specified before for a notification, if everything worked you should see one like this if you used the message above.

StarBot is happy!

 at the bottom of your Zapier flow. You should now get a message about turning the zap on. Click the button and it should change from grey to green. The zap is now activated and will run every 

 (or faster) according to the plan you’re on to check for new stars.

✨ Bonus: Get notifications for all repositories

If you need to watch a lot of repositories, you can avoid having to set up many different zaps and instead use a different GitHub Trigger Event. The event you want is called 

To set up this, create a new zap as we did before. Choose GitHub as the trigger and then 

At the next dialog, you need to choose the actor of the event - 

. Most likely you are interested in other people starring your repositories, so choose 

 and proceed to follow the same instructions from above. Make sure to filter for 

 in the filter step or you might get a lot of notifications.

✨ Bonus: Know more about your stargazers

If you get a lot of stars for your repositories, you might not want a notification for every new star. What if you could only get notifications for certain developers, based on attributes like how often they contribute to open source or topics you're interested in?

This is where the upcoming Orbit API can help.

The Orbit API gives you handy data about GitHub users, which you can use to make your Zapier flows more interesting, either by adding filters or just more information.

Here’s what previous Slack message looks like with data from Orbit.

StarBot + Orbit

The Orbit API is currently in private beta. If you'd like early access, drop us an email to 

There will always be more community members than developer advocates and community managers, and never enough hours in the day. 

Automated workflows with smart developer data remove manual work from a team’s task list and help them make better decisions about which developers to spend the most time with

Follow along for more blog posts that show how to implement these workflows using tools like Zapier, Orbit, Slack and more. If you have a favorite workflow or would like you'd like to see us write about, drop us a line at 

Gain more visibility into your community with our 5-step Zapier guide.

I knew fundraising would be hard—everyone said so. But despite all the advice I received, I wasn’t fully prepared for the emotional and intellectual challenges we experienced over the 12-week period from our first angel meeting to closing the round.

Events and emotions moved quickly, and we had our fair share of disappointments, but we met some amazing people, learned lots about investor psychology, and felt all the feelings.

In the interest of sharing my learning (which is a practice we keep at 

), I’ve put together a few of my personal observations from the process. If you’re thinking about raising VC, you’re probably looking for as much advice as you can find. And even though I can’t fully prepare you for what’s coming, I hope my experiences will shed some light on parts of the process I found surprising and provide some useful context along the way.

Perhaps my biggest area of learning was in understanding VC methods and psychology.

 excited about a deal, right up until the point that they formally decline (or in the crappy cases, ghost). If they don’t, founders won’t take them seriously, and they’ll lose the edge in a competitive situation. After all, who wants to enter a multi-year relationship with someone who’s lukewarm?

This can lead to whiplash for founders, who can get emotionally invested in a particular relationship that 

Early in our process, we allowed our perceived excitement from the VCs to “lead us on,” resulting in unwarranted confidence. Later, we learned that VCs who are truly interested will either opt-in on the spot, or provide a clear path to getting the information they need to make a decision.

Phrases like “Keep me posted on progress,” and “Follow up with me as the round comes together” sound nice, but don’t actually mean much

, and we learned quickly to focus our time and energy on the people clearly leaning in—and learned not to be too shocked if they bowed out later, despite leaning in earlier. 

Ultimately, we decided to chalk this behavior up to game theory and weird incentives, and tried to avoid a more cynical interpretation. Don’t hate the player, hate the game, and all that.

Many times, it was clear early in the meeting that an investor was going to pass. Instead of acknowledging this and winding down the meeting, they’d usually keep the chat going to learn more from us about the market, the key players, or specifics of our approach.

Before Orbit, my cofounder Josh and I founded a developer relations consultancy. 

 was also the first developer relations hire at Algolia. We know a lot about this area, and guess what? Every VC we spoke with has a portfolio company struggling with those very challenges. Without realizing it, we definitely gave a DevRel education to VCs up and down the Peninsula.

That’s fine for us—we’re happy to share what we’ve learned. 

But remember for VCs, access to information is an advantage

, in relation to competitive VCs but also in relation to founders they’re negotiating with—potentially you.

Be aware of and intentional about what information you share, and of the motivations of others when they ask for your time and mental capacity.

One of the most effective ways to clarify your storytelling is to update your deck with input and insight from your meetings. For us, each pitch exposed weaknesses in our narrative or uncovered confusing phrases or charts. And often, an investor would share a quote or stat that supported our position.

We committed to reviewing and revising the deck as frequently as possible, sometimes in a car en route to the next meeting. We’d kill the unclear slides and tighten-up key points. By the end, we had a deck that anticipated objections and told a powerful story.

You might be worried that frequent deck updates make it harder to remember your pitch. 

We found that a conversational approach was more effective than delivering a memorized presentation

. As a result, the ongoing edits didn’t impact our presentation.

Tactically, we maintained a few different versions of Google Slides internally, and used DocSend to manage sharing links to the deck. With DocSend, we could upload a file and generate URLs for individuals that all pointed back to the same underlying file. 

Some VCs will say they prefer a PDF via email, and we’d oblige if asked. But I liked that, with DocSend, anyone with a link would always see the latest version of the deck. That way, no one had an outdated version in their inbox, which could lead to confusing conversations later.

One morning during our fundraise began with high hopes and lots of confidence. We’d gotten deep into the process with two firms, let’s call them A and B. Firm A moved quickly, but had been one-upped by Firm B, who’d booked a Monday afternoon partner pitch within days of initially meeting. Mondays are usually important days at firms, when all partners are in the same building to make decisions and to hear high-priority pitches.

On the train to Palo Alto to pitch Firm B, somewhere around Burlingame, we received an email from Firm A, who we were meeting with two days later: they decided to pass. Then, after that day’s pitch in Firm B’s office, we got word that they were passing too.

Within hours, we went from the prospect of competing term sheets from great firms to no deal in sight.

But then, just two days later, we received our first term sheet from a firm we were 

excited about, and by the end of that week it looked like our round would almost certainly be oversubscribed. Quite a turn of events.

 excited about the term sheet, but not overly attached to a specific outcome.

 In light of the week’s craziness, we’d internalized the need to moderate our emotions and roll with the highs and the lows.

Fundraising will create excitement and anxiety in weird and new ways

, so do your best to roll with the punches, whatever that means for you. Making time for exercise, getting plenty of sleep, and focusing on the big picture (versus the daily ups and downs) helped me.

Every fundraise is different, but hopefully these observations will help focus your actions and avoid any unnecessary emotional swings along the way.

If you found this info helpful, or have any follow-up questions, please let me know on twitter 

Even though I can’t fully prepare you for what’s coming, I hope my experiences will shed some light on parts of the process I found surprising and provide some useful context along the way. 

What I learned raising money as a first-time founder

, we suggested that, with the right developer, 1:1 onboarding could increase product as well as community activation, resulting in happy and successful developers and a more vibrant community. 

It also helps you learn exactly where new developers get stuck and turn that into valuable feedback for product teams.

That sounds good in theory, but will developers 

Not everyone, and that’s okay. The ones that do are likely working on an important project or genuinely interested in solving their problem, and that’s exactly the kind of developer you should be spending time with.

To avoid the spam folder and be truly helpful, you’ll need to ensure several parts of your program are developer-centric. Here are some tips for doing just that.

No developer wants to “just jump on a quick call.” 

That kind of offer doesn’t provide clear expectations about why the developer should invest their time, and will probably be ignored. Instead, work to understand where and how developers get stuck, then tailor the offer to help.

Try a subject line like "Invitation to pair" versus something like "Checking in on progress.” The former is a clear and helpful offer, while the latter isn’t clear about the benefit to the developer. 

Keep in mind that many developers prefer asynchronous communication like chat to synchronous communication like meetings.

Offer different approaches to connecting with developers, including:

Starting a DM conversation on a community Slack

Chatting via messaging tools like WhatsApp

: if you really want to go above and beyond, make a dev-friendly landing page with program details and testimonials from developers who participated and found it helpful. Add photos and bios from the engineers they’d connect with and describe what to expect. 

This builds trust that they’re in for a good experience

When reaching out, be sure the message sounds like something one engineer would say to another. Avoid marketing adjectives and adverbs, and get right to the point.

Offer to help with any questions they might have, product-related or not. That’s because 

advocacy extends to adjacent things they might need help with too

If possible, tailor the language of your outreach to include specific context related to their favorite languages or frameworks. This is one area where keeping track of your community member’s interests in a tool like 

There are several points when a developer is more likely to accept your offer to talk.

Following signup, your tools are top-of-mind for new developers. Instead of making the offer at the exact time of signup, though, consider sending the invite a day or two later, once they’ve had a chance to skim the docs and try a few things for themselves. By then, it’s more likely they’ll have generated some interesting questions for you to discuss.

What if you sent a note to a developer after the first time the use a key feature? This can also be useful if you noticed a sharp dropoff in usage. It could be the case that they were just exploring your tools, or, it could be that they got caught on a key part of the implementation, but don’t have the energy to dig through the docs.

If so, your offer to help could be well received.


To make the session more effective for both you and the dev, ask them to complete a checklist before joining the call. This might include provisioning an API key or installing important packages in advance.

At the end, you can offer some next steps. 

If they seem interested in your community, invite them to join your slack or forum.

Finally, ask them for permission to send a followup email with links to things discussed on the call. Make sure that email is not canned but natural and personal.

To measure the program, you can compare the activation rate and follow-on usage of developers who do 1:1 onboarding against the developers who don’t. Also keep track of the time you spend on the program which will help you calculate the overall ROI.

One great way to scale onboardings is to 

recruit other engineers in the company to help staff the program

. Not only will customers love talking to product engineers, the engineers will benefit from increased customer empathy from the calls.

There are lots of ways to get started with a 1:1 onboarding program, but our advice is to start small. Block off an hour a week for two sessions and see what happens. Ask marketing if they can help you send the offer to a small segment of the signups. As you learn, iterate on your findings and invest in what’s working.

Over time, you’ll learn a lot about your customers and community, and hopefully provide help to the developers who need it most.

With the right developer, 1:1 onboarding can increase product and community activation, resulting in happy and successful developers and a more vibrant community.

Orbit Blog

Download these Orbit Model icons for your Slack workspace

Join us in orbit with these spacey custom emoji for your Slack.

How to use Slack and Airtable to easily collect swag information

Star a message in your community Slack to kick off a flow that collects swag info from a helpful developer.

How to get a Slack notification when someone stars your GitHub repository

Gain more visibility into your community with our 5-step Zapier guide.

What I learned raising money as a first-time founder

Even though I can’t fully prepare you for what’s coming, I hope my experiences will shed some light on parts of the process I found surprising and provide some useful context along the way.

When and How to Offer 1:1 Onboarding to Developers

With the right developer, 1:1 onboarding can increase product and community activation, resulting in happy and successful developers and a more vibrant community.

How Facetime Can Improve Developer Onboarding

Why a hands-on approach to activating developers actually makes sense.

Our guide to using DEV for DEVeloper relations

Learn how to create a presence for your DevRel team on the welcoming, fast-growing DEV community site.

Laying the Groundwork for a Successful Developer Relations Hire

Two steps to increase your chances of a successful hire and reduce the likelihood of burnout.

Collaborating with Developer Relations: a Three-part Series

How DevRel can partner with Marketing, Sales, and Product teams for maximum effect.

DevRelCon London 2019: Tweets, photos, and congrats

A roundup of tweets and slides from DevRelCon London 2019, plus a special congratulations.

Introducing Orbit

Orbit helps companies drive adoption by understanding and growing their developer communities.

Why Orbit is Better Than Funnel for Developer Relations

DevRel teams need tools and models created specifically for our discipline, and not just those adopted from other fields.