Boosting Adoption through Improving the 1st Hour Developer Experience

By Ryan Boyd

Elevator Pitch

With a background in cloud PaaS, IaaS and Saas, I’ve learned it’s critical to get developers enabled and feeling successful in the first 5 minutes. How can that be accomplished with on-premise software? This talk explores the lessons learned building an online trial with interactive tutorials.

Description

When I joined Neo4j, my charge was to grow awareness and adoption of the Neo4j Graph Database. With a background in cloud PaaS, IaaS and Saas, I expected developers to get started working with the product quickly. However, Neo4j is a downloadable on-premise product.

I believe many users are hesitant to download and install software on their computers, regardless of the perceived value. I also believed that users will consider this a long task for the back burner / a rainy day!

Why a Cloud Service?

Even after proving to myself that downloading and installing the product could be done in 1 minute, I wanted to ensure the ‘download barrier’ wasn’t hindering adoption. So, I returned to my roots and created a cloud service.

Additionally, creating a cloud service allowed for us to enhance the product in ways to improve the first-user experience– something we previously couldn’t do without taking time away from core product developers. We created datasets and interactive tutorials to guide users through their first steps using a new type of database. We automatically created user accounts, gave users template code for a variety of languages, and used OAuth-based signin and Auth0 to make the process easy.

To date, we have over 10k users of the Sandbox.

In this session, I’ll discuss the business and technical requirements, (briefly) review the architecture and design, and then evaluate the success of this approach for a docker-based sandbox trial environment towards our key goals: awareness and adoption.