> I have a sort spot for the folks at Twilio, because they were actually the ones who convinced us to do ads on Read the Docs originally, with a hacked together campaign way back in like 2015
This sounds really interesting! I find it fascinating that Twilio was willing to do such a personalized project with a relatively small company. Would you be willing to share the story?
Specific curiosities:
* Did you reach out to them, or did they reach out to you?
* Who were you working with there? (someone in a business unit, or someone in engineering?)
* Twilio is huge with (I imagine) big reputation risk. Why were they okay with being such early adopters?
* What was the process like working with them through this campaign?
Looks like it was 2015. We did a fundraising campaign on our site (wrapup blog post here: https://blog.readthedocs.com/fundraising-wrapup/), which was our first big attempt at fundraising. To be 100% honest, we didn't reach our goal, and we padded the numbers with a Python Software Foundation grant, and the Twilio ad sponsorship to not fail in public. We were doing millions of pageviews a month at that point, but had a lot of failure around fundraising. More info on the burnout and sadness of that period here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2018/feb/7/the-post-i-neve... -- but moving on to the happy ending :)
The Twilio folks reached out as part of that campaign. Specifically it was Rob Spectre, who I think was very forward thinking about their developer outreach at the time. They wanted to sponsor us, and in return we promote the upcoming events & blog posts they were doing.
It was very lightweight to start. I think we filled out their "event sponsorship" form, they gave us the money, and we put some images & copy in the sidebar of the docs using our theme.
I think they were willing to do this because they saw the massive opportunity of the channel we had. We've been able to build a business that supports a team with almost the exact concept they pitched to us, so the value seems obvious in retrospect.
This sounds really interesting! I find it fascinating that Twilio was willing to do such a personalized project with a relatively small company. Would you be willing to share the story?
Specific curiosities:
* Did you reach out to them, or did they reach out to you?
* Who were you working with there? (someone in a business unit, or someone in engineering?)
* Twilio is huge with (I imagine) big reputation risk. Why were they okay with being such early adopters?
* What was the process like working with them through this campaign?