David Noël

Evangelism

I’ve been sitting on this anonymous Tumblr Question for a while now:

So what exactly does a Technical Evangelist “do”? Specifically a SoundCloud Evangelist.

I won’t go into the definition of the term as Wikipedia already provides more general and historic details about it.

Don’t know about you but my short answer is: before an Evangelist does, she is.

When I look around and think about the people around me here on Tumblr, I can see Evangelists everywhere. Hiten Shah, Dave Lifson and Mike Hudack all are entrepreneurship evangelists. Fred Wilson, Brad Feld, Mark Suster and Bijan Sabet are Startup Visa and “modern” venture capital evangelists. Jen Robinson, Jimmy Morris, Mark Schoneveld: music evangelists. Carmen Magar? Mass customization. Jen Bekman? Affordable art.  Jay Parkinson? Re-inventing health care. Mareen Fischinger? Photography. And Topher? He was evangelizing Tumblr to the point they got him to move from Florida to work with them out of NYC.

You get the point. All of these folks share one common thing: passion. That’s all it takes to be an Evangelist for something: a band, a product, a cause or a company.

You don’t join a company for the sake of being an Evangelist. You don’t join a company - or for that fact, a startup - for a pay check. You join a startup because you believe in the product, the vision and the people executing it and you will do whatever it takes to help the push things forward. You can’t go work as an Evangelist if you don’t love the product and everything it stands for. You can’t browse job openings for Evangelist positions on Monster or Craigslist and just apply for the ones you randomly stumble upon. You’ll have to breathe the product and know as much as possible about the company before you even type the first word on your cover letter. Heck, best case you wouldn’t even have to send a cover letter because the company already found you (see Topher above).

An Evangelist will most likely spend his day & most of his nights communicating, informing, teaching, solving, helping, connecting, moderating, arguing, motivating, getting & keeping people excited about what you, your company and its product do. You’re a company’s sonar, you listen to what is being said outside and you channel that feedback into the product.

Even better when it doesn’t stop there: at the same time you’re excited about an entire industry (tech & music - in that order) or a ‘movement’ (open source, API’s, entrepreneurship, independent artists) and you’re an advocate for remarkable things and people working hard every day to make a change.

If you find the company you love and end up being its Evangelist, you probably have found your dream job. You can’t call it a job though, it’s so much more than that.

Oh right, we were talking about the SoundCloud Evangelist. There’s more in this Q&A I did on our blog and it’s only half of what I do 8 months after it was posted. Things move fast in startup land.

This sounds like you, want to join the fun? We’re looking for a kick-ass, self-motivated and awesome Community Management Intern. Do the things mentioned above and work with a great & passionate music community.

Would love to hear from others, so make sure to add your thoughts to the comments.