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# Stateshift: Stateshift is a devrel strategy consulting. coaching and execution company that helps technology firms build user and developer ecosystems around their products. Founded by Jono Bacon, a 27-year+ veteran of community and developer engagement (formerly at GitHub, XPRIZE, and Ubuntu), Stateshift’s mission is to turn the “messy magic” of engagement into predictable, repeatable systems that drive measurable growth.

Our flagship product, Stateshift Pathfinder, is a full-service program in which we embed alongside our clients as a co-pilot. Pathfinder combines deep strategic guidance with hands-on execution — diagnosing the real friction in developer journeys, designing structured frameworks, and implementing them with the team. Clients receive biweekly accelerator calls, monthly leadership reviews, and unlimited on-demand coaching, ensuring progress never stalls.

Stateshift’s frameworks cover key areas like developer onboarding, content systems, YouTube and podcast strategy, community programs, metrics dashboards, and brand positioning. Each framework is modular, data-driven, and designed for reuse long after engagement ends.

We work primarily with venture-backed tech companies (Seed to Series C) in sectors such as DevTools, SaaS, AI infrastructure, and open source — including GitHub, Dagger, Umbraco, Okta, and Adobe.

What sets Stateshift apart is our unique blend of strategy and execution: we don’t just advise, we install engagement operating systems for growth. Our approach builds movements that are structured, measurable, and scalable — helping teams grow faster, strengthen engagement, and create network effects that last.

## Sitemaps
[XML Sitemap](https://blog.stateshift.com/sitemap_index.xml): Includes all crawlable and indexable pages.

## Posts
- [Can you run developer GTM by yourself in Series A?](https://blog.stateshift.com/series-a-gtm/): We see this pattern constantly. You feel the gap, you reach for a hire in Series A GTM, and the job description gets written before the actual problem does.
- [Why Most Popular Developer Onboarding Tactics Fail](https://blog.stateshift.com/developer-onboarding/): Developer onboarding is held together by the usual three tricks, trotted out like nobody remembers why anymore. A drip email, nagging gently. A tooltip that ambushes the screen like a timeshare pop-up. And, for the truly desperate, a gamified onboarding checklist with a progress bar that fills in when someone clicks "Verify email," as though that constitutes a genuine achievement in anyone's professional life. This just gets you a confetti animation.
- [Why Most GTM Strategies End Up In The Garbage Bin](https://blog.stateshift.com/why-gtm-strategy-fails/): I spend my days talking to founders building genuinely clever developer tools, and then I watch those same founders spend the first twelve months of go-to-market lighting that cleverness on fire in four almost identical ways. Same garbage can on fire, same reason why go to market strategy fails. I'd love to tell you it's creative. It is not. It's the same arson, wearing a different hoodie.
- [The Engagement Triangle: Where Should Your DevRel Effort Actually Go?](https://blog.stateshift.com/how-to-prioritize-devrel-activities/): Every DevRel team I've ever met is busy. Gloriously, exhaustingly, heroically busy. Blog posts, conference talks, Discord replies at midnight, hackathons, podcasts, livestreams, newsletters. The works. And yet, come budget season, they're standing in front of a CFO with a slide deck full of impressions and a conspicuous absence of anything that looks like revenue. Being busy and being effective are not the same thing, and most DevRel programs are confusing the two at scale. Knowing how to prioritize DevRel activities is the thing most teams never get a framework for. That's the problem the Stateshift Engagement Triangle was built to fix.
- [Impressions Lie. Measure Influence Hours Instead.](https://blog.stateshift.com/how-to-measure-developer-awareness/): Learning how to measure developer awareness properly is one of the most practical ways a DevRel team can earn credibility with leadership. At Stateshift, we built Influence Hours as the answer: reach multiplied by time multiplied by an engagement weight tied to how intimate the format is. A 30-minute in-person talk to 100 of your ideal customers isn't the same unit of attention as 10,000 blog views. The math should say so.
- [Octolens Review: A Practical Review for DevRel and GTM Teams](https://blog.stateshift.com/octolens-review/): Our take after this in-depth Octolens review: it's a good tool. It's also a tool that will disappoint you if you sign up expecting a feed to fix a problem no one owns.
- [Stop Marketing to Developers Based on Vibes](https://blog.stateshift.com/developer-marketing-channels/): The ads don't convert. The podcast doesn't move pipeline. The launch that was supposed to change everything gets four upvotes on Hacker News and disappears by lunch. Most teams are picking their developer marketing channels with eyes shut, relying on vibes to make something stick.
- [The Wrong Way to Build DevRel at Series A](https://blog.stateshift.com/devrel-for-series-a/): This, I'm afraid, is what DevRel for Series A looks like when the order is wrong. At Stateshift we see versions of this more often than we'd like, and it's the single most expensive DevRel mistake a company can make.
- [The Stateshift Model: How Developer Tool Go-To-Market Actually Works](https://blog.stateshift.com/developer-go-to-market-strategy/): Getting your developer go-to-market strategy right is one of the hardest jobs in software. Your buyer is technical, skeptical, and allergic to being sold to. Your product needs to be tried before it's understood. A competitor is giving away for free the exact thing you charge for. And you're being asked to prove ROI on a budget nobody questioned six months ago.
- [The Developer Go-To-Market Sequence: What to Build First](https://blog.stateshift.com/developer-go-to-market-sequence/): You've raised the round. For the first time you've got real money to point at developers, and now you have to decide where it goes first. Do you hire DevRel? Do you pay a known voice in the space to talk about your product? Sponsor a newsletter? These all sound reasonable, and that's the problem. Get the developer go-to-market sequence wrong and you'll spend six months and a good chunk of your raise finding out.
- [Your Homepage Won’t Get AI To Recommend You](https://blog.stateshift.com/how-to-get-recommended-by-ai/): The question underneath all of it is the same: how to get recommended by AI when a developer asks a tool what to use.
- [How to Choose a DevRel Consultancy: A Founder’s Buying Guide](https://blog.stateshift.com/how-to-choose-a-devrel-consultancy/): In other words, he didn't have a clear idea on how to choose a DevRel consultancy.
- [Developer Experience Strategy: A 90-Day Playbook for Founders](https://blog.stateshift.com/developer-experience-strategy/): So let me lay out what we mean by a developer experience strategy for a B2B tech company. Who it's for, what the surfaces actually are, and what the first 90 days look like if you want a system instead of a vibe. This is the work Stateshift does for developer-focused companies, and it's worth being precise about it, because most of the advice out there is aimed at a different problem entirely.
- [Nobody Is Ignoring Your Product for Lack of Innovation](https://blog.stateshift.com/developer-go-to-market/): Most founders think their developer go-to-market strategy is about building better features than the competition. The reality is that most developer products are not being outcompeted on features. They are being outcompeted on how they make developers feel when using their product.
- [How to Prove DevRel ROI: Metrics That Matter in 2026](https://blog.stateshift.com/devrel-roi-metrics-how-to-measure-communitys-business-value/): Understanding DevRel ROI metrics requires tracking developer activation rates (20-40%), community-driven retention improvements (37% faster feature adoption), and measurable business impact correlation. Stateshift has worked with 250+ developer-focused companies to solve this exact measurement problem.
- [Your Strategy Isn’t Broken. Your Timeline Is.](https://blog.stateshift.com/developer-program-timing/): This happens constantly in developer programs. Teams put out a blog series, a YouTube channel, a community online session. They do it for a few weeks. They check the numbers. The numbers don't feel like they're going anywhere. So they cancel the program and start thinking about what to try next.
- [How to Measure Developer Go-To-Market Success in 2026](https://blog.stateshift.com/how-to-measure-go-to-market-success-for-developer-audiences/): You are never going to see the full developer journey, so stop building your measurement as if you will. Read the stages you can infer, find where people fall out, run the loop on whatever is leaking. That is measuring developer go-to-market success once you drop the fantasy that developers behave like everybody else.
- [From Meetups to Metrics: A Developer Event ROI Framework](https://blog.stateshift.com/developer-event-roi/): The real question behind developer event ROI is much simpler.
- [Circle Review: Pros, Cons, and Who It’s Best For](https://blog.stateshift.com/circle-so-review/): And that difference matters. That's what this Circle review focuses on: not features, but when Circle's approach actually makes sense. On the surface, most platforms in this space look similar. The real differences show up once you're managing scale, permissions, automation, and pricing.
- [The KubeCon 2026 Survival Guide](https://blog.stateshift.com/how-to-prepare-for-kubecon-2026/): If you're figuring out how to prepare for KubeCon, the most important thing to know upfront is this: it's not about volume.
- [Mighty Networks Review: Is It Really Worth It?](https://blog.stateshift.com/mighty-networks-review/): In this Mighty Networks review, we’ll take an honest look at the platform: its strengths, weaknesses, and the most effective ways to use it, based on our experience working with other clients.
- [You’re Doing the Right Things but in the Wrong Order](https://blog.stateshift.com/developer-advocacy-strategy/): ...well the same principle applies to your developer advocacy strategy and how you build brand advocates around your company.
- [Why Building for The Average User Destroys Your Product](https://blog.stateshift.com/product-adoption/): If you’re building a developer platform or SaaS product…you’ve likely heard of the term average user. And if you're wondering why product adoption keeps stalling despite solid features, that "average user" might be exactly the problem.
- [How Underdogs Beat Giants In Tech](https://blog.stateshift.com/product-differentiation/): This is ultimately a product differentiation strategy problem, not a performance one.This post will walk you through a framework you can use to do the same thing for your product.
- [GitHub Stars Are Developer Instagram Likes ](https://blog.stateshift.com/beyond-github-stars/): After spending years watching open source projects obsess over star counts while their actual communities withered, we've developed a rather unfashionable opinion: GitHub stars are the participation trophies of the developer world.
- [Why “Better Features” Is a Losing Strategy](https://blog.stateshift.com/positioning-strategy-framework/): Teams lead with features, comparisons, and technical superiority, assuming that should be enough to win.  In this post, we'll break down why that positioning strategy fails and what to do instead if you want developers to actually choose your product, trust it, and advocate for it.
- [How Stateshift Helped Bentley Activate 2,400 Employees in Their Internal Community](https://blog.stateshift.com/internal-communities-of-practice-bentley/): Bentley Systems did not begin building internal Communities of Practice (CoP) as a reaction to a problem.
- [Product Stickiness: Why Most Developer Products Fail After the First Use](https://blog.stateshift.com/product-stickiness/): Part 3 of the Dev Engagement Series: Product Stickiness
- [Why The Developer Metrics You’re Tracking Are Lying to You](https://blog.stateshift.com/metrics-for-devrel/): Here’s an uncomfortable truth: most metrics for DevRel focus on activity, not outcomes, which makes it harder to measure the success of DevRel teams when leadership asks real business questions.
- [The Future of DevRel: Six Shifts Reshaping Developer Engagement in 2026](https://blog.stateshift.com/future-of-devrel-2026/): The future of DevRel isn't about doing more. It's about doing different.
- [Scaling Community-Led Growth Without Losing Authenticity](https://blog.stateshift.com/scaling-community-led-growth/): Scaling community-led growth isn't about doing more. It's about doing the right things in the right order.
- [How interop.io Built a Developer Community Their Customers Actually Use](https://blog.stateshift.com/building-developer-communities/): Building developer communities starts with understanding what developers actually need. interop.io had been serving technical teams for years. Their customers were solving complex integration problems every day. A developer community felt like the natural next step, but the team needed a clear starting point and a plan that fit their reality. That is where Stateshift came in.
- [Opus Clip Review: Can It Make Shorts That Grow Your Channel?](https://blog.stateshift.com/opus-clip-review/): In this Opus Clip review, we break down how the tool actually works and where it delivers real results.
- [From Documentation to Developer Tool: How We Helped GitHub Turn Docs Into Action](https://blog.stateshift.com/github-security-lab-case-study/): GitHub Security Lab faced a challenge. They'd put together solid documentation showing maintainers how to secure their open source projects using GitHub's free security features. Six clear recommendations, all valuable, all free to implement.
- [How to Market to Developers Without Losing Their Trust](https://blog.stateshift.com/developer-marketing-voice/): Your developer marketing strategy falls apart fast when you get the voice wrong.
- [Peec AI Review: What We Learned After 3 Months of Testing](https://blog.stateshift.com/peec-ai-review/): I've spent the last few years deep in SEO, helping clients rank, experimenting on our own site, and getting comfortable with tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush. SEO has a rhythm. Once you understand the signals, you know where to look and how to make progress.
- [How to Launch a Developer Community: A Practical Implementation Guide](https://blog.stateshift.com/how-to-build-a-thriving-developer-community/): This guide walks through the tactical decisions and systems you need when launching a developer community - from platform selection to measurement setup to creating early momentum.
- [Community-Led Growth Best Practices: 5 Strategies That Actually Drive Revenue](https://blog.stateshift.com/community-led-growth-best-practices/): This is the problem with most community efforts. Lots of activity. Lots of energy. But no clear line between "people are talking" and "business is growing." Most teams skip the best practices for community-led growth and hope engagement somehow becomes revenue.
- [The Community-Led Growth Framework for Developer-First Companies](https://blog.stateshift.com/best-practices-for-devrel-programs/): A community-led growth framework is what prevents this. The teams that get community-led growth to compound treat it as a framework with four specific systems. The ones that treat it as a collection of tactics watch it drift. That distinction is what the best practices for DevRel programs in 2026 actually come down to. Not more events. Not more posts. Not more Slack channels. Whether the pieces you already have connect into something that moves on its own.
- [How to Make the Most of KubeCon: A Practical Guide for Developer Tools Companies](https://blog.stateshift.com/how-to-make-the-most-of-kubecon-a-practical-guide-for-developer-tools-companies/): Your team just booked a booth at KubeCon. Someone forwarded you the exhibitor handbook. You're looking at 10,000+ attendees, hundreds of sponsors, and a price tag that's hard to justify unless you generate real pipeline.
- [The Developer Advocacy Framework: How to Turn Developers Into Brand Advocates in 2026](https://blog.stateshift.com/how-to-turn-developers-into-brand-advocates-developer-advocacy/): Most teams get stuck here. They know developer advocacy matters. Companies such as Stripe and Twilio built large developer movements through structured advocate programs.
- [Developer Feedback Loops That Actually Drive Adoption](https://blog.stateshift.com/how-to-collect-developer-feedback/): Competitors who treat developer feedback as a growth engine start earning the trust that once came your way... the kind of quiet credibility that’s hard to win back.
- [How to Scale DevRel Programs](https://blog.stateshift.com/how-to-scale-devrel-program/): At Stateshift, we've worked with 240+ technology companies to build DevRel programs that scale. The solution requires a systematic approach that connects DevRel work directly to company goals, measures what matters, and iterates based on data rather than intuition. We call this the Outcome-First Framework, and it transforms scattered DevRel activities into focused programs that leadership can confidently evaluate and fund.
- [How to Increase User Participation in Tech Communities: The 5-System Framework](https://blog.stateshift.com/increase-participation-in-tech-communities/): At Stateshift, we've worked with 240+ tech companies to solve exactly this challenge. Whether you're running a Discord server, Slack community, or forum, the participation gap appears regardless of company stage, platform choice, or team size. Tech communities that thrive have repeatable systems that convert interest into action.
- [Developer Community Engagement: How to Turn Conversations Into Ongoing Participation](https://blog.stateshift.com/developer-community-engagement/): Developer community engagement doesn’t fail because people aren’t talking. It fails because conversations don’t continue.
- [Why Technical Documentation Beats Code Quality Every Time](https://blog.stateshift.com/why-technical-documentation-beats-code/): After working with hundreds of tech companies on their open source strategies, one pattern keeps showing up: the projects that thrive don’t always have the best code. They have the best technical documentation and the best systems around that code.
- [How to Scale Developer Relations Content Without Losing Your Voice](https://blog.stateshift.com/how-to-scale-developer-relations/): You've got a two-person DevRel team trying to scale developer relations with a content calendar that expects output from five people.
- [Developer Ambassador Programs: Proven Tactics for 2026](https://blog.stateshift.com/developer-ambassador-programs/): They build systematic developer ambassador programs that turn power users into amplifiers of your product’s value, with clear criteria for participation, meaningful rewards, and measurable business impact.
- [Developer Onboarding Mistakes That Kill Communities](https://blog.stateshift.com/developer-onboarding-mistakes/): Poor developer onboarding isn't just losing you members. It's systematically destroying the foundation you've worked to build. According to Stack Overflow's 2023 Developer Survey, developers rank strong community support as one of the top factors when adopting new tools, but broken onboarding experiences create lasting negative impressions that ripple far beyond a single lost user.
- [How to Connect DevRel Community and Marketing Teams](https://blog.stateshift.com/connect-devrel-community-and-marketing-teams/): DevRel community and marketing teams often start with different goals.

## Pages
- [Stateshift Blog](https://blog.stateshift.com/): Every Series A founder we work with hits the same moment. The board wants developer...
- [SHIFTsignal](https://blog.stateshift.com/shiftsignal/): SHIFTsignal is not a boring email newsletter filled with links you don't care about. It is a weekly dose of practical techniques, tips, templates, and more for how to build a movement around your company, products, and projects.
- [New Blog Page](https://blog.stateshift.com/new-blog-page/): ℹ️ Join SHIFTsignal and get more like this to your inbox:
- [Blog](https://blog.stateshift.com/blog/)
- [Privacy Policy](https://blog.stateshift.com/privacy-policy/): Suggested text: Our website address is: https://blog.stateshift.com.

## Categories
- [AI/ML](https://blog.stateshift.com/ai/)
- [Brand & Storytelling](https://blog.stateshift.com/marketing/brand/)
- [Brand Ambassadors](https://blog.stateshift.com/marketing/ambassadors/)
- [Case Studies & Wins](https://blog.stateshift.com/news/wins/)
- [Community Building](https://blog.stateshift.com/community/)
- [Content & Education](https://blog.stateshift.com/dev/education/)
- [Developer Engagement](https://blog.stateshift.com/dev/)
- [Developer Onboarding](https://blog.stateshift.com/dev/onboarding/)
- [Developer Relations](https://blog.stateshift.com/dev/devrel/)
- [Events](https://blog.stateshift.com/dev/events/)
- [Marketing](https://blog.stateshift.com/marketing/)
- [Metrics](https://blog.stateshift.com/dev/metrics/)
- [News & Insights](https://blog.stateshift.com/news/)
- [Open Source](https://blog.stateshift.com/opensource/)
- [Stateshift LIVE](https://blog.stateshift.com/news/live/)
- [Stateshift News](https://blog.stateshift.com/news/stateshift-news/)

Stateshift is a developer relations consulting and ecosystem strategy partner for fast-growing technical teams. We help technology companies build, scale, and measure community-driven growth through clear systems and developer-friendly practices. This site includes resources on developer relations (DevRel), community strategy, content strategy, AI search optimization, and developer engagement.