Orbit Joins Heavybit

We’re happy to announce our newest member to the Heavybit portfolio, Orbit. Orbit helps teams manage their developer community and connect with contributors, ambassadors, and influencers to build better APIs, features, and products.

The significance here is two-fold. In order to innovate well, companies need a cloud API and developer strategy. 51% of Fortune 100 offer public APIs, and McKinsey estimates that the number of public APIs will triple over the next 12 months. Even companies that aren’t technology companies are investing in software, and developers have a more influential role in enterprise purchasing decisions for their organizations. As a result, developer advocacy and dev rel have become increasingly must-have roles in any organization.

The problem is, this emerging discipline lacks the tooling needed to work effectively. From awareness, to adoption, to gathering feedback — managing technical communities is challenging. Existing CRMs and automation tools are designed for traditional marketing departments. Orbit is built in the belief that developer experience and developer relations teams need tools built specifically for their needs.

Some of the dev rel and product signals that aren’t captured by today’s marketing tools, include enriched developer profiles, project activity, 3rd party dev community social discussion, and other trade and project-specific conversations. Orbit aims to change this.

The founders of Orbit met at Heavybit alumni company Keen IO, where they built the data platform powering the Keen IO API, authored and maintained the Keen JavaScript SDK (1M+ NPM downloads with dozens of public dependents), and created Keen’s Dashboard Starter Kit (9.7k stars and 1.2k forks to date), Explorer App, and early user docs and guides. Their experience in building a high-traction bottom-up developer product at Keen IO, and their subsequent experience at Algolia, Apple and developer program agency DeveloperMode (clients include Stackshare, Square and Forestry.io) make them a great addition to the Heavybit community.

The company announced their early access program in November, and recently spoke about their plans at DevRelCon London. For dev rel and product teams that are tired of shoehorning developer engagement into traditional sales and marketing tools, sign up for consideration to the early access program.

Meet the Orbit Founders

Patrick Woods | CEO | LinkedIn
Patrick Woods is the cofounder and CEO of Orbit where he leads the team’s revenue,go-to-market and customer development efforts. In the past he led the customer success teams at Keen IO and Figure Eight. He has more than 10 years marketing and customer operations experience and is the author of the Brand Strategy Canvas (Apress).

Josh Dzielak | CTO | LinkedIn
Josh is the cofounder and CTO of Orbit where he owns the product roadmap, community engagement and management of all things engineering. In the past, Josh was the first developer advocate and dev rel lead at Algolia, was the VP Engineering at Keen IO and has spent 10 years in engineering roles with 6 as a dev rel speaker and influencer.

Dustin Larimer | VP Design | LinkedIn
Dustin is the cofounder and VP Design at Orbit where he works on user experience, brand design, and product development. In the past he’s been the Senior Product Designer and Design Technologist at Apple and the UX product leader at Keen IO where he created the Keen Dashboards, Explorer Apps and Stream Manager.