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When we started building Apify 8 years ago, we were a group of scrappy hackers who spent their days jumping back and forth between customer support, platform development, contributing to open-source, and building scrapers for our customers. Everybody did everything, everybody knew about everything, and our early customers loved it.
Then, as Apify grew, we specialized. We hired support people, sales people, more engineers, and suddenly everybody worked only in their area of expertise. We lost that early hacker spirit. It certainly helped us grow as a company, but our customers kept saying that they miss those good old days.
And onto the stage come.... Drumroll… Apify product advocates!
What is product advocacy?
There’s no standard definition of product advocacy. As always, companies adapt the competencies and responsibilities of the role to their own unique needs.
When finding our own definition, we took inspiration from other successful developer platforms. Vercel and Postman, among others.
Vercel:
The product advocates team is proactively reaching out to people that are stuck versus waiting around for people to tell them they have a problem.
-- Morgane Palomares, Sr. Dir. of Growth & Revenue Marketing, Vercel
Postman:
The Product Advocates are here to help you get the most out of Postman. We frequently host interactive webinars to help with onboarding with Postman, collaboration, testing and updates to Postman.
In summary, product advocates at software companies generally focus on the following areas:
- proactive technical support and product usage optimization
- personalized product advice, onboarding and training
- shortening time to value for customers
- helping customers find optimal commercial arrangements
Product advocates at Apify
I will address the elephant in the room right away. Yes, you’re right, we didn’t start a product advocacy department out of the goodness of our heart. We started it to help Apify grow even faster. But we strongly believe in growing with our customers, not at their expense.
Apify’s pricing is predominantly usage based. The more our customers scrape and automate, the more money we make. Simple as that. If we can maximize the value our customers are getting from our platform and services, and improve their return on investment, they will naturally increase their usage, and Apify will grow with them. Everybody wins.
With this in mind, we came up with our own definition of product advocacy:
Product advocates are our customers’ trusted advisors and their representatives within Apify. They always have the customers’ best interests in mind, and use their extensive product knowledge and technical expertise to proactively help and advise customers.
Through personal conversations and product analytics, product advocates strive to learn about our customers’ needs, challenges, and the value they’re expecting to get from Apify. Their goal is to use this knowledge to maximize customer value and return on investment through personalized onboarding, technical training, and commercial advice.
What can you expect as our customer?
Product advocates will be proactively looking to help your team succeed. This means that they may reach out from time to time with product updates, recommendations and tips. Let me give you some examples:
- If you’re using multiple Actors or start a lot of Actor runs, they might suggest an appropriate monitoring setup, so that you never miss a performance issue.
- When you start integrating our API, they can offer best practices and personalized developer training.
- They will send you friendly reminders about unused features included in your subscription, like our regular tech trainings, which can help you optimize your Actors and their usage.
- When you run into overages, they will help you find the best subscription plan for your current use case, and for your future plans.
- They understand that solo developers, startups and enterprises have different needs and they will show you how to use Apify in a way that’s best for you and your team.
- Because the advocates speak with hundreds of customers, they can offer industry and use-case specific advice for getting the most out of web scraping and automation in your company.
If you prefer to learn and explore on your own, we get that. You can always let us know that you would prefer not to be contacted, and we will honor it.
Still, proactive outreach is only one part of the job. You can certainly contact your product advocate and ask them questions about Apify, Actors, or even Crawlee, our open-source web scraping library. They will always be there to help you understand how Apify works and how to make it work the best for you.
Product advocates vs. customer success
It probably crossed your mind – aren’t product advocates only rebranded customer success managers? Yes, and no. By choosing a different name, we (and the companies before us) wanted to emphasize certain small, but important differences.
- Product advocates are technical, and they’re able to have deep conversations about our product without needing help from an engineer. CSMs usually rely on the support of other teams.
- Product advocates are trusted advisors who focus on improving customer experience across the board. CSMs usually focus on upsells and renewals.
Certainly, not all CSMs are like that. Kudos to all CSMs who are passionate about their products and making their customers truly successful. That’s what the name of the game should be.
But after getting ignored by too many bad CSMs while having issues, only to be contacted later with a price increase, we decided that we wanted a different brand for our team. A brand that puts product knowledge and helping customers at the forefront.
