Thread by @ckindel

1/ The term "Technical Evangelist" was coined by @GuyKawasaki in "The Macintosh Way" '89 (IIRC). It was effective because Guy (and others) recognized technical people (engineers) had a propensity to 'get religious' about technology.

https://twitter.com/halberenson/status/1097952940906741766

@GuyKawasaki 2/ For some reason, technical people love picking sides. Often they will 'sell' whatever tech they used first, or had success with. This is just a fact.

Guy, and subsequently, the founders of MS's DRG group (Cam, Brad, Brian, Robert, Alistair, ...) understood the power of this.

@GuyKawasaki 3/ Just as in 'real' religions, 'converts' and 'disciples' are a scale mechanism for gaining further converts, DRG was formed to explicitly and intentionally use religious evangelism techniques to prosthelytize the virtues of Windows to app developers.

@GuyKawasaki 4/ This is the brilliance of DRG (that was lost in the MS DPE era): Use a small number of MS Technical Evangelists (~10) to build and army of independent app developers (1000s) to champion for the Windows platform (over OS/2).

Apple used this very effectively with iOS/AppStore.

@GuyKawasaki 5/ Technical Evangelists (at least in my book) are not technical marketers.

Marketing is the act of getting someone else to buy something from you.

Evangelism is the act of getting someone else to sell something FOR you.

@GuyKawasaki 6/ Technical Evangelism is a bit slimy. As at TE, you are explicitly, and intentionally, playing on the the tenancies of technical people to want to belong; to want to be part of a bigger company's vision.

For example, I employed TE techniques to drive Windows Home Server...

@GuyKawasaki 7/ ... We had no marketing budget. But I knew there were dozens of MS employees and external enthusiasts where 2 things were true:

1) They loved the concept of a home server.
2) They hated their actual jobs and wished they were part of a product team.

@GuyKawasaki 8/ So I did two things:

1) I created an internal program called "Quattro Champions". I gave employees who joined the feeling that they were part of the 'WHS team'. I gave them jobs (e.g. your job is to monitor forums and post goodness). I paid them with a t-shirt and ...

@GuyKawasaki 9/ ... an invite to a "team meeting" once a month.

2) I found a few external enthusiasts and did basically the same thing. I made them feel like they were part of the team building the product. That's all I had to do to get them to do a massive amount of work...

@GuyKawasaki 10/ ... that I could never actually pay for. They loved doing it and we had a lot of fun together.

This is just one example of a "Technical Evangelism" playbook. When we made Win32 and then COM/OLE happen, we applied the same techniques.

@GuyKawasaki 11/ Another example from the COM days. We identified 3 external training firms that were doing COM/OLE training. We explicitly 'king made' them. The best example was Developmentor and @donbox. We had an internal rule for about a year that nobody was to hire Don into MS.

@GuyKawasaki @donbox 12/ (I hope this isn't the first time you've heard this Don, but you were way too valuable outside of MS than inside at that time). I don't think we ever directly funded Developmentor, but we certainly ensured they got tons of free marketing. Because we knew Don was so good...

@GuyKawasaki @donbox 13/ ... at telling our story. He was the perfect example of a disciple.

IMO, Technical Evangelism is the ONLY way to achieve scale in getting platform technologies adopted.

The primary reason so few companies do it effectively...

@GuyKawasaki @donbox 14/ ... is very few Technical Evangelists have the ability to convince traditional marketing people of the power of evangelism. This is why Evangelism died at MS in the DPE era.

Which brings us full circle on this thread and @halberenson's post.