Every DevRel team I've watched get cut in the last two years was cut because nobody at the top could see what they did. Smoower is my answer to that. An index that makes the work visible, comparable, and impossible to ignore.
The DevRel Index is a public index of developer relations activity across companies. It looks at the public surface of DevRel: docs, GitHub activity, developer content, community presence, events, integrations, package ecosystems, response patterns, and other signals that show whether a company is actually investing in developers or just saying it does.
What an index can actually change
The shift I want is the same shift that happened to SEO twenty years ago.
Before tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and SEMrush, search marketing was a black box. People knew it mattered, but nobody could prove it relative to anyone else. Then a handful of indexes came along, gave the discipline a shared vocabulary and a comparable surface, and the entire field professionalised within five years. Budgets stabilised. Job titles got senior. Boards started asking informed questions instead of suspicious ones.
DevRel needs the same moment. We need:
A way to see, for any given company, what their public DevRel surface actually looks like, to compare that surface across companies in the same category and to track changes over time, so a board can see whether DevRel investment is moving the needle in a measurable direction
Most importantly, a shared method that does not change every time a new vendor wants to sell you a dashboard
That is the bet behind Smoower. Build the index first. Argue about the methodology in public. Let companies see themselves and their competitors in the same frame. Make the conversation possible at all.
What Smoower actually does, in plain language
Smoower is an index of developer relations activity across companies.
We collect public signals (documentation freshness, content cadence, community presence, conference participation, plugin ecosystems, response times in public channels, and a few other things), score them against a methodology that is documented and open, and produce a comparable per-company score over time. You can look up your company. You can look up your competitors. You can see how a category like "AI infra" or "developer tools" trends quarter over quarter.
It is not a productivity tool for individual DevRel folks. It is a visibility layer for the field as a whole. The point is not to grade humans. The point is to make the discipline legible to the people who decide whether the discipline continues to exist next year.
If you are running DevRel right now and you want a way to walk into a budget conversation with something other than vibes, that is who this is built for.
This was not possible two years ago
I want to be honest about something. If I had tried to build Smoower in 2023, it would have been a glorified spreadsheet with a small research team feeding it by hand. That is what every previous attempt at a DevRel index actually was. Slow, expensive, biased toward whoever the analyst at the firm happened to like, and updated maybe twice a year.
The reason this version can exist now is LLMs.
Here is the specific problem they solve. DevRel output is heterogenous in a way most categories are not. One company's signal is a polished docs site. Another's is a Discord with 40,000 messages a month. Another's is a YouTube channel. Another's is twenty engineers writing essays on their personal blogs. None of those surfaces look anything like each other on the wire. A traditional crawler can count pages, count members, count posts. It cannot tell you that the docs site has not been touched in eighteen months while the Discord is full of unanswered questions. It cannot tell you that one company's blog post has actual technical depth and another's is the same press release published seven times in different fonts.
LLMs can. Not perfectly, but well enough to normalise. They can read a docs page and judge whether it is fresh or stale. They can read a community thread and identify whether the question got an answer. They can compare two technical blog posts and tell you which one is doing real DevRel work and which one is content marketing wearing the costume.
That normalisation is what makes a fair index possible at all. Without it, you are either reducing everything to a few crude counts, which is what most existing "DevRel scorecards" already do and why nobody trusts them, or you are paying analysts to read each surface by hand, which is what boutique research firms charge fifty thousand dollars a year for and which can never update in real time.
The narrative layer matters too. A raw score is useful, but it is not what a board reads. What a board reads is "your community response time dropped 40 percent this quarter, and here is what changed." Generating that summary, for every company in the index, every quarter, used to require a human writer. Now it requires a model, a methodology, and a careful editorial pass. Same output, very different cost curve.
Why now, honestly
There is a more personal piece to this. After getting laid off from DeepL, I spent a few weeks talking to other DevRel people who had been through the same thing. The pattern was depressingly consistent. Good work, often great work, that nobody upstairs could see or compare. Quiet teams getting quietly removed. People rebuilding their careers from a position of "I cannot prove what I did, only describe it."
I do not want the next wave of DevRel people to walk into that meeting carrying screenshots and anecdotes. I want them to walk in with a number. Their number, the industry's number, a chart, a methodology, a thing the CFO can read.
That is what Smoower is for.
It is going to launch incomplete. Indexes always do. The first version of any benchmark is wrong in interesting ways, and we will iterate in public on the methodology, the signal set, the weights, all of it. That is the deal. I would rather ship a measurable thing we can argue about than wait another two years for the perfect framework while more teams get cut.
If you run DevRel at a company, or you care about DevRel surviving as a discipline, I would like you to come look at it when it goes live, push back on it, and tell me what we are getting wrong. That is how an index becomes a standard. Not by being right on day one.
I will write more about the methodology soon.
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