Hi, we’re Orbit, and we’re building a company based on the principles of developer relationship management.

Since getting started in August, we’ve signed on investors and advisors including 

, and a world-class group of angels who have extensive experience building developer-centric businesses, including James Tamplin (co-founder and CEO of Firebase), Sam Ramji (Apigee and Google), Andrew Miklas (co-founder and CTO of PagerDuty), and Aghi Marietti (co-founder and CEO of Kong). See the full list below.

Our core product combines data, a powerful API, and a modern user interface to give organizations deeper insight into their developer communities and better tools for growing and managing them.

If you’d like early access to Orbit, please drop your email address in 

We’re creating Orbit because convincing developers to adopt new technologies is hard. Developers famously reject traditional marketing and sales efforts, preferring to learn from people and communities they trust. As a result, founders and operators of developer-centric businesses struggle to adapt existing CRMs and marketing automation tools to the developer use case.

We believe that people working in emerging disciplines like developer experience and developer relations need tools built specifically for their needs. 

Tools built on the right principles for building communities, like the 

Orbit has three co-founders—Patrick, Dustin, and Josh. We've known each other since working together at analytics API company Keen IO, and each of us has spent a big part of our careers working with developers.

 was Keen’s VP Engineering and went on to lead the developer relations team at Algolia. After Keen, 

 led customer success for machine-learning company Figure Eight. 

 spent the last two years at Apple designing and making internal tools for developers. Patrick and Dustin live in San Francisco, with Josh a mere nine time zones away in Paris.

Leading up to Orbit, Josh and Patrick created DeveloperMode, an agency that helped companies with developer relations. We’re now 100% focused on Orbit and aren't taking on new clients, but we're always happy to chat with companies wanting to improve their developer adoption, just send us an email at 

We'll share knowledge, experience, and company updates here on the 

If you work on developer adoption—as an advocate, evangelist, community manager, marketer, or founder—then what we're building is for you. 

If you'd like early access or are open to sharing your ideas on what Orbit can help you achieve, drop your email in the form below and we'll follow up.

Thank you to all of the angels who invested in Orbit’s pre-seed round:

James Tamplin (Firebase), Sam Ramji (Apigee), Andrew Miklas (PagerDuty), Aghi Marietti (Kong), Nina Khosla, Guillaume Montard (Bearer), Martyn Davies (Nexmo), Lou Kosak (AirBnb, Plaid), Michelle Wetzler (Twilio), and Kyle Wild, Dan Kador, and Ryan Spraetz (Keen IO).

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

Introducing Orbit

Originally published on developermode.com

The funnel is widely accepted in sales and marketing circles, but despite its popularity, we think it has a few shortcomings when applied to developer relations:

, and not other kinds of relationships between a company and its audience

, i.e a person is either a lead or not a lead, and if they’re not a lead, we don’t want to bother with them

For certain teams, the funnel remains a useful model. In fact, many marketing teams are judged on how effectively they move leads through the funnel.

DevRel teams need tools and models created specifically for our discipline

, and not just those adopted from other fields.

That’s because other models assume a specific kind of buyer-seller relationship, but developers don’t shop in the same way as other B2B buyers.

For example, a dev might use a tool for years before purchasing. Or they might never purchase at all, but given their influence, they might refer dozens or hundreds of paying customers.

That person deserves attention from the company because they can influence growth, but the funnel doesn’t know what to do with them. Short-term conversion is the wrong thing to optimize for, so how else can we effectively model this kind of relationship?

Creating consistent, authentic connection opportunities between developers is the most reliable way to introduce new tools into the developer community and help them grow.

Connection is people-centric, not stage-centric, and therefore excels at producing that most important of moments—the moment in which 

one developer passionately refers your product to another

, an essential type of growth in a situation where 

. Word-of-mouth referral can happen in many contexts, both online and offline.

The mission of a developer relations team following the orbit model is to facilitate high-quality word-of-mouth exchanges.

But given time and budget constraints, DevRel teams can’t dive deep with every developer in the community, so how can you create context for connections at scale? Whether we like it or not, good strategy is all about hard choices, and one of the most important choices DevRel teams make is how to give different groups appropriate levels of engagement.

The Orbit Model accounts for the complexities of community, and allows DevRel teams to segment developers more effectively,

 and then to take action by facilitating connections between developers with and across segments, pulling the community together as a whole.

The first step is segmentation, but given the complex nature of the developer relationship, the linear nature of the funnel’s stages don’t work well. 

Instead, try to think about grouping your audience into levels of orbit

Orbit levels aren’t set in stone, and you should tailor your levels for your situation, but we find that 

 works well for most developer-facing companies.

 an inner circle of developers that are highly satisfied, knowledgeable users of the product and have a large influence in the broader developer community

 speak at conferences, organize events in local communities, run workshops, build plugins and integrations, amplify announcements, be a customer reference, and 

 visibility, help building their brand, exclusive or early access to features, direct lines of product support, speaking engagements, training, free product usage, overall to 

: 1:1 email, Twitter DM, messaging apps, shared Slack channels, video calls, IRL, i.e. make it personal

: a wider circle of developers who are passionate about the product, have successfully used it, and are happy to share their expertise with their sphere of influence

 contribute to documentation and SDKs, build hackathon projects, write blog posts, moderate forums and chats, build showcase projects, give detailed feedback, attend and speak at meetups, attend conferences, beta test new features, host internal workshops, and 

: learning opportunities, reputation-building, speaking opportunities, special swag, discounts, higher quotas, financial support and resources for their community

: Owned community chat/forum spaces like Slack, Discord, Spectrum, Discourse, GitHub issues and PRs, social media, IRL at events

 developers who are actively using the product, and who at a minimum have some online or offline interaction with other developers

 introduce the product to colleagues, be the champion in a deal, upgrade to a paid version, try out new features or related products, and 

: a fast and reliable product, solid documentation, well-maintained SDKs, high-quality support, extensive library of demos and examples, generous free tier, reasonable self-service pricing, swag

 customer support, office hours, product-centric email campaigns, feedback widgets, on unowned developer channels like StackOverflow, Reddit, HackerNews, DEV, et. al.

 the rest of the developers who’ve shown interest by signing up, trying out or subscribing, but aren’t active and 

: read content, browse high-level documentation, execute lightweight code samples, play with an example app, participate in games, contests and challenges

: Quality on-trend technical content, high-level product-centric content that explains use cases, guides and tutorials, starter kits, community projects, social proof, games, entertainment

 Content marketing, newsletters, advertising, brand awareness

So how do you know what developers go into which orbit? There’s a general equation that’s driving the segmentation above. It looks like this:

, a function of sentiment and product familiarity. 

, a function of the size of the developer’s sphere of influence and their authority within it.

 If there’s no love, reach doesn’t matter because there won’t be anything valuable to say. If reach is zero, there’s no one there to spread the love to.

Gravity (Love x Reach) is the criteria for segmenting developers, 

but it also provides a clue for increasing the value of your community

The higher the gravity, the lower the orbit.

The ultimate goal of the Orbit Model is to help you 

maximize the amount of gravity in your solar system

. Gravity is a force of attraction. The higher the levels of developer love and connection, the better your community will be at attracting new developers and encouraging existing members to participate more.

To build a high-gravity developer community, DevRel teams following the Orbit Model should:

make connections in and across orbit levels

offer the right opportunities to developers in each orbit

encourage the right people to move inward and commit more

make it easy for developers to share their love

How can this be applied on an everyday basis? Here’s an example that should be familiar to any DevRel.

Let’s say we’re launching a new feature and want to email folks about it.

Orbit level is a way we’d segment the message. Orbit 1 (O1) and Orbit 2 (O2) might get a message earlier with an ask to help beta test coupled with more detail or transparency that wouldn’t be appropriate for a mass mail, but would be more likely to drive engagement with them. We would then tweak the mass distribution to O3 and O4 based on input and feedback from O1 and O2.

Want to apply the Orbit model in your DevRel team? It’s a big vision, but the orbit model can be adopted incrementally. 

Start with O1 by creating a spreadsheet and filling it with your most engaged and influential developers.

 Then moved up to O2. For both O1 and O2, list out what you can ask them to do and what you can do for them in return. Create some next steps to make that happen and you’re already off to a great start 🚀

In the future, you can incorporate the model into your CRM and top-level KPI reporting, but today you can already get value from segmenting your outreach.

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

Orbit Blog

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.