Dev Influencers: Recent Episodes
Charles Max Wood
A daily discussion of what it takes to advance your career by being a hero to your developer community. We discuss journeys into becoming well known, building audiences, podcasting, and having products that lead them to the next stage of their journey!
If you're making a difference, you can make much more of a difference if you can go full time.
In order to do that, you're going to need to replace any income that comes from things that are not on mission for you.
You need to start thinking about monetizing parts of your mission. This doesn't mean not putting up free content, but it does mean that some folks are in a position to pay for more help than you can provide for free. You can help them accelerate and they can help you open the door to help more people.
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- Charles Max Wood
Once you're making a difference you need to start measuring your impact and figure out what you can do to make more of a difference.
Chuck talks about what you need to do to figure out which problems to solve and how to provide solutions that really make a difference.
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- Charles Max Wood
Many people want to become influencers because they want to make a difference. This episode dives into how to make a difference or how to figure out what it's going to take to get people the outcome you want.
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- Charles Max Wood
The most common objection that people put up when they are approached about becoming an influencer is that they don't have enough experience. Chuck breaks down the flaws in that thinking and tells some stories of people he knows who started a show even if they were new.
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- Charles Max Wood
Charles Max Wood talks about becoming a Developer Celebrity. He breaks down the idea of being famous or a celebrity and how he's come to terms with the ideas around prestige and squared that up with where he wants to go.
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- Charles Max Wood
In the last episode, we talked about building a reputation and how that leads to trust so that people will buy from you. This episodes explains how to show up over and over again so that people can find you and then how to address your audience to know what they want so you can build the course they need.
It also explains how to make a proper pitch to get them to take the next action.
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- Charles Max Wood
Building a reputation is building trust. It shows people that you have the skills necessary to get them what they want, which means that they can buy from you or hire you without much risk.
Chuck walks you through how a podcast will help you build your reputation and how to use it to build relationships and how to parley that into opportunities you're looking for.
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- Charles Max Wood
In the trifecta of Skills, Relationships, and Reputation, Chuck explains how relationships make the difference in getting what you want.
Essentially, but offering to give people what they want over and over, you begin to see some of those things come back to you.
You shouldn't build relationships focused on what you get, but you should be strategic about who you try to build relationships with in the first place.
To learn how Chuck does this with his podcasts go to https://devinfluencers.com/apply
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- Charles Max Wood
Luca asked Chuck if he could do a podcast about his UX and UI work to get customers.
Initially, Chuck told him that probably wouldn't work, but then had an idea that turned that on its head.
Chuck explains how to put together a podcast about your subject matter that will attract your customer.
To learn how to start your podcast go to https://devinfluencers.com/apply
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- Charles Max Wood
This episode walks you through the process of finding your ideal freelance clients and opening a dialogue with them to show them what you have to offer.
Chuck walks you through setting up a podcast to interview your ideal clients and what to do with them once you have them on for the interview.
To learn how to start your podcast go to https://devinfluencers.com/apply
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- Charles Max Wood
Personal skills is an often overlooked set of skills in the developer market until a team or individual encounters someone who completely lacks them.
These days you can't build significant software without working with a team., so these skills are becoming more and more critical.
Listen in to learn how to grow in this area to build your relationships.
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- Charles Max Wood
When we talk about skills in the Developer space, we're usually talking about technical skills.
In fact, even when we move on from technology, we often are talking about techniques and strategies, which are basically more technical skills.
Technical skills are important and we discuss how to grow and build them.
We also discuss how to know WHICH skills to build and when to focus on other types of skills.
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- Charles Max Wood
In order to get where you want to go, you'll need three essential ingredients in your career.
Most people only focus on having the skills they need to do a particular job so they can get paid or promoted to the next level closer. However, there are two other ingredients that make it much easier and simpler to get what you want.
You make other people want it for you and you make them believe that you deserve it. In other words, relationships and reputation.
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- Charles Max Wood
Chuck dives into the 3 essentials for getting the next successful outcome you want in your career. Whether that's something simple like a raise or something more complex like going freelance, you can achieve it by working on 3 main areas.
First, building skills. The most obvious type of skills you'll need is technical skills. However, don't neglect your people skills and your organizational skills as well since you're often paid for how you work with people and enhance their work and how you put your work together in the most efficient ways.
Second, building relationships. Often other people will be able to help you find the opportunities or will be the ones to make the decisions that impact your ability to get the outcome you want. Having good relationships is key to having good outcomes.
Third, building recognition. Being known for being valuable in important ways allows you to leverage the skills you have to build better relationships and create opportunities to get what you need to get the outcomes you want by giving people what they want. A podcast is a great way to do all three. Chuck explains exactly how that works in this podcast and goes deeper as part of the Dev Influencers Accelerator.
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Chuck explains what he taught Nathan last week when we asked how to get hired at a FANG (Facebook Apple/Amazon Netflix Google) company. Essentially, it boils down to how to build the skills and knowledge needed to pass the interview. How to build the relationships to get into the door and have the interviewer want you to succeed. And how to build the reputation that has the company wanting you regardless of the outcome.
This approach also works for speaking at conferences, selling courses, and other outcomes as well as it's the core of building a successful career as an influencer.
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- Charles Max Wood
Chuck was on a strategic call with one of his potential coaching clients talking about cryptocurrencies and realized that this is one of the major reasons that people want to become influencers. Or, rather, that many people aspire to make a difference and/or make money and the best way to do that is to become the person people go to for what you do.
So, how do you become the first person people think of when they think of that thing you know how to do? Let Chuck tell you.
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- Charles Max Wood
Charles talks about the things that get developers stuck when they're trying to start their podcast or other influencer channel. He explains how to get around having those things hamper your journey.
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- Charles Max Wood
While at a retreat/conference in Nashville, Chuck learned the importance of relationships and had a breakthrough moment where he realized that all of the success he's had and the fulfillment he gets from the podcasts he does stem from the relationships he's built. He explains how to build them, nourish them, and resolves to rekindle the ones he already has.
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- Charles Max Wood
Charles Max Wood talks about how to build, grow, and benefit from positive relationships within programming. He talks about how he's built genuine positive relationships with hundreds of programmers and how he and others have grown from those relationships. He also explains that you get out of relationships what you put into them. Finally, he goes into how to begin to build relationships by building a system of influence you can use on behalf of the people you want relationships with.
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- Charles Max Wood
Charles talks about a conversation he had with his friend Zach while in Nashville. Zach asked what skills are most important for podcasters and Chuck explained that people tend to get hung up on the quality of their equipment or the number of topics they have rather than on taking their listeners on a journey. He explains how to overcome these so you can become a successful Dev Influencers.
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- Charles Max Wood
Charles Max Wood talks about how to build, grow, and benefit from positive relationships within programming. He talks about how he's built genuine positive relationships with hundreds of programmers and how he and others have grown from those relationships. He also explains that you get out of relationships what you put into them. Finally, he goes into how to begin to build relationships by building a system of influence you can use on behalf of the people you want relationships with.
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- Charles Max Wood
Chuck dives into the next part of his journey, where he goes freelance. He got his first client based on his naiveté and the next several from his podcast and screencasts. He explains how it worked and what he did to convert listeners and viewers into paying customers.
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- Charles Max Wood
Chuck explains his journey into going freelance leading into how that effected the trajectory of his programming and podcasting careers.
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- Charles Max Wood
Richard asked Chuck on a strategic call how much he should put himself out there. Chuck talks about where he's found the lines for that to be and what some of the tradeoffs are to being yourself versus cultivating a persona.
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- Charles Max Wood
Chuck explains the next stage of his podcasting journey. He talks about the opportunities that came his way and what they materialized into. He was handed a successful video series from a friend of his because he was already producing content. He also made a job transition after getting laid off within 6 hours of finding out that he was unemployed.
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- Charles Max Wood
Charles Max Wood discusses several opportunities that came his way early in his podcasting career and other opportunities that have come to other people after only a couple of podcast episodes. He explains why that happens and how you can use this to create more influence as a developer.
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- Charles Max Wood
Chuck had a call with Dean earlier this week where Dean was trying to help people find some open source software he'd built to help React developers. He was surprised that, even though it's a great solution that he gets positive feedback from his user base on, it's not growing. Given a couple of days worth of thinking, Chuck answers the question in a way that he wishes he had when Dean was on the call
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- Charles Max Wood
Chuck talks about how he got his first full time job as a programmer and how he got into podcasting. He explains that in both instances, he found success because he found mentorship and help early in his journey from people who could help him get around the major obstacles in his way
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- Charles Max Wood
Charles explains his journey leading up to his podcasting journey starting and what got him on the path to beginning podcasting.
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- Charles Max Wood
If you want to become a Dev Influencer, go to https://devinfluencers.com to apply for the Dev Influencers Accelerator.
Chuck is often asked how to come up with great podcast episode topics. He explains that the best way is to connect with your community and find out what they're talking or asking about.
One source of this is facebook groups, another is users groups, third, conferences.
You can also check newsletters and other curated sources.
Finally, and probably best, talk about what you're working on.
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- Charles Max Wood
If you want to become a Dev Influencer, go to https://devinfluencers.com to apply.
Chuck talks through the different kind of microphones for podcasting.
Podcasting recommendations:
- ATR 2100x - https://amzn.to/2QZFlAf
- Samson 2qu - https://amzn.to/3uvekmV
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- Charles Max Wood
If you want to become a Dev Influencer, go to https://devinfluencers.com to apply.
In this episode, Chuck asks the 5 questions that he used to outline his 3 year vision and how he worked backward from there to define how he's going to build his Dev Influencer vision and avatar and how he's moving forward in his influencer journey.
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- Charles Max Wood
If you want to be a Dev Influencer, go to https://devinfluencers.com.
In this episode, Chuck talks about the REAL reason that he's a Dev Influencer. He talks about the listener he met at Microsoft Build and what the story this listener told him that changed the way he saw podcasting forever.
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- Charles Max Wood
Charles Max Wood started podcasting because it sounded fun and because he wanted to talk about technology. He learned pretty quickly that it got him access to people who understood the things he wanted to learn. The reasons changed over the years, as Charles explains before he talks about the big payoff he gets now from doing the podcasts.
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- Charles Max Wood
If you want to be a Dev Influencer, go to https://devinfluencers.com.
Some of the benefits you get from being an influencer are a lot of fun. Some of these I've enjoyed include getting basically free coaching from some of the top people in the field.
I've also been invited to conferences as both speakers and as media to cover the event.
I've met my developer heroes.
Chuck tells the stories of the fun things he's done as a podcaster over the last 12 years.
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- Charles Max Wood
This episode dives into why you should become a Dev Influencers. This episode dives into the long term goals you probably have that being a Dev Influencer enables.
Do you want to be well known? How much do you want to make? How do you want to be making it? Who do you want to be helping? What kind of a difference to you want to make?
Do you want to matter?
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- Charles Max Wood
Charles Max Wood introduces the Dev Influencers' Show and explains that the show is for people who are looking to go from Senior developer to the level beyond it.
You're looking to become a mentor, build a business, build a course, or make other contributions to community. In order to do that, you need to build influence within the community. That will enable you to grow into a position where they can get where you want.
This show will help them fill the gap between where you're at and where you want to be.
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- Charles Max Wood
Jason Weimann started out as an enthusiast of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, Everquest. After becoming a software developer and building a collaborative community playing the game, learn how he used his connections to get a job working for the company that made the game, even if it wasn't a job working as a game developer and how that led to a career working on one of the most popular online games of the time.
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- Charles Max Wood
Chuck outlines how he's used his podcasts to find mentors to continue his learning journey over 12 years of podcasting. Some mentors have been long lived relationships while others have lasted only a few months or even days. This episode shares Chuck's experience learning from the top people in the development community as a programmer and podcaster.
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- Charles Max Wood
John-Daniel Trask, founder and CEO of Raygun, talks about his experience building a monitoring company and about how to measure the speed and quality of your code.