For the past 6 to 8 months, I've been observing that a lot more of the DevRel in India has started to become more of a freelancing gig. Companies pay someone to do a series of events. That person charges or gets the money, does the event, and gets a fraction of it, plus multiple more sponsors as well. Not saying that there is anything wrong, but whatever happened to building developer programs...

This is a very interesting and exciting change in the landscape of developer communities for me personally. I've been building a platform to solve this problem. Right now, it seems like something like PPC or PPV, like paid ads you run on Google, Meta, or anywhere else. This is more like "which weekend can you occupy?" or "how many people can you gather?" The point is that there are enough people to attend all of them, whether online or offline.

Having talked to multiple companies around this to see if there's a freelancing gig opportunity: 1. Let's do a pilot 2. My budget is USD 500, can you do an event for me, min 100 people 3. We need a 100 people event and 100 sign ups on our product 4. Let's do a hackathon 5. We want x00,000 people to register for our next developer series. Budget is negligible

The thing is that earlier the question was: if I run a community through you, what is the ROI that I will be getting? 1. We need X number of people and X number of sign-ups. 2. These are isolated engagements or events happening, and they don't care about re-engaging with these people later, which is surprising.

Obviously, there are bad elements everywhere and good elements too both take either advantage or support the ecosystem to become better. In a market like India, you can fill the room with good count of devs, everyone is eager to learn, network, and meet people, and obviously the brand association also counts. Most importantly, the organizers are making good bucks. Is it a win-win for both? Probably.

I am trying to build something to basically support these as well, but what is the status in your region?