I
n the second episode of Newsletterers I interviewed Mary Thengvall who publishes DevRel Weekly. The newsletter is an extension of her long career in tech community management and developer advocacy and started as a way to start filling some of the resource gaps that she identified in her own come up.
In the process of writing her book and running her company, Mary was reading voraciously. Also in the process of running her company and writing her book (and other things) Mary developed a trusted content lens that other developer relations professionals wanted to apply.
All this together lead to DevRel Weekly.
Over the course of our conversation we covered:
- Why you should never do a weekly newsletter (unless you’re going to do a weekly newsletter)
- The importance of being gracious with yourself (especially when you’re giving people free stuff)
- The magic number at which you start attracting sponsors (spoiler; there is no magic number)
- Ways of involving your community in your process
- Using your content to generate even more good content (like a yearly analysis of all the newsletters you published)
- Her thinking around monetization and making Patreon perks that align with her core business
- Her process: RSS -> Pocket -> Zapier for filtering -> Curated to publish
- The types of newsletters she likes to read
- And more!
If you aren’t already, please consider subscribing to both this podcast and my newsletter. I also have the twitter, and would love to talk to you about this episode there.
