Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Edge Impulse CEO Zach Shelby (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click on how you managed to get 12,000 developers working and building on your platform.

Zach Shelby: What I found to work best with developers is radical transparency, focusing on what they care about, and how they work with their product. In our case, we provide machine learning tools in the cloud and lots of software around that. We are providing an open TRR platform so we don’t treat a developer as a customer, we treat them as a part of our team.

Developers use our products for free. It’s not just free for trial, we make it free all the way to production use. It’s all free for individual developers using our product. We are really trying to make them successful.

The other thing is we’re very transparent with our documentation. You need to have lots of documentation and have that completely available to developers at all times. There’s no firewall or signing up your name to get access to documentation. That is another important factor.

Sramana Mitra: How did the developers find you? What is your way of making yourself visible to developers?

Zach Shelby: That is the third and most important piece and that is the content. You have to produce good content all the time from your core team. Our approach is that we have our entire team, not just my co-founder and CTO, produce content. All of the core engineers and FAE in our team produce content. We are writing a lot of tutorials, blogs, videos, and lots of content on how to be successful with machine learning.

That is what gets the pick-up from communities. You build those communities through Twitter, LinkedIn, and on some of the technical developer forums. That is how you start to build a following with developers. They start to sign up to your platform using this strategy. That is the strategy that we have seen to work well.

Sramana Mitra: Content marketing is your primary way of communicating with developers.

Zach Shelby: Yes, it’s very technical content. It’s not marketing in the traditional sense, but it’s producing content by asking the question of how we can help developers learn to do this and how we can give them great tutorials that will help them. The other thing that we found is that it’s really slow to build that developer following from scratch if you are just doing content approaches.

It’s a slow process. The only way to build developer communities fast is to leverage existing developer communities. With that said, we also do partnerships. We partner with some of the big communities like Hackster and Hackaday. This also includes a lot of developer communities of our partners like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Silicon Labs.

Arduino is a huge developer community. Raspberry Pi who we launched with this week has tens of millions of developers. You have to partner with the people who already have a developer community. Some of those developers will become your developers. That is the fastest way to do it.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Edge Impulse CEO Zach Shelby
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