Introducing the Ecosystem

A newsletter about platforms and developer ecosystems by Calyx Consulting

We’re at an inflection point in the world of APIs: more and more companies are realizing the potential of platforms to multiply their business’s value. They know speed to market and domain expertise will be their competitive advantage, but have a gap in talent or bandwidth.

If you’re building a platform, you’re probably thinking through a laundry list of challenges:  

• Building developer community: Which programs to invest in; how to measure success 

• Telling your platform story: why should developers, partners and customers care? Even more –  how can you get your internal team to care and build with a platform-first mentality?

• Establishing a “developer-first” brand, voice and tone

• Driving adoption of the platform; fuelling the platform flywheel 

• Creating partner/SI programs and co-marketing plays 

• Thinking through an app marketplace: how to drive adoption, and how to help developers list their apps successfully 

• Building a developer reach & content strategy

• Building the platform team: hashing out org structure, and making the right hires, to power it all 

• Up-skilling your team to understand developer/technical audiences 

We’re starting this Substack as a way to share what we’ve learned, having talked and worked with dozens of leaders in the category. We’ll share our guides, templates, and trends on the world of developer platforms and ecosystems. 

Wait, who are you? 

We’re Ceci Stallsmith and Paige Paquette of Calyx Consulting. We work with founders and executives facing these questions. We’ve been there before and can see around corners others may not: we were both early platform hires at Slack, helping grow the ecosystem to well over 600K daily active developers and half a million weekly active apps.

With Calyx, we’ve been fortunate to work with some of the world’s top developer platforms, from Twitter, to Niantic (creators of Pokémon GO), 1Password, and Zoom, among others. We have been investors in the dev tools space, and founding team members bringing developer startups from 0 to 1.

Why “The Ecosystem”?

Admittedly it’s a bit of a buzzword, but in essence,  that’s what we love to help build...in a digital sense. 

Thriving platforms *are* ecosystems, with partners, developers, system integrators and the core platform all benefiting from each other.

Tell us what you want to read! 

Our hope is to make this experiment truly collaborative. What challenges are you facing? What do you want to read about? What questions do you have?

 If we don’t know the answer, we’re likely able to help you find it. Just reach out. 

Paige @PaigePaquette

Thinking about writing more and sharing more of our playbooks / best practices. So! What questions do you have around platform strategy, devrel/ dev marketing, or product marketing? Lemme know.

February 11th 2021

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Let us know on Twitter: @PaigePaquette and @CeciStalls🍃