Somewhere right now, a payments API with beautiful docs has zero weekend projects built on it. Closing that gap is what a developer relations agency gets paid to do.
Developer relations, shortened to DevRel (the practice of winning developers through education and community rather than advertising), has grown into a service industry of its own.
The audience justifies it. SlashData, the research firm that sizes the developer economy, counted 47.2 million developers worldwide at the start of 2025.
Few companies selling APIs (application programming interfaces, the connectors that let one program use another) can afford in-house advocacy before their first big funding round. Agencies rent out the whole function, and the hackathon circuit is their sharpest product.
What a hackathon circuit actually involves
A circuit is not one sponsored weekend. It is a season of events run as a single measurable operation, and it follows a fixed sequence.
- Audit the integration surface. The agency tests the client’s SDK (software development kit) and quickstart guide until a first successful call takes under fifteen minutes.
- Book the season. It schedules a slate of events, often through Major League Hacking, the student league that sanctions over 300 hackathons a year.
- Ship a challenge track. Teams get starter repositories plus pre-issued sandbox keys for a sponsored prize category.
- Staff mentor tables. Agency engineers debug webhook problems (automated callback messages) and tokenization errors (swapping card data for safe placeholders) live, logging every stumbling block.
- Convert and report. Winning teams are walked to production access, and the friction log becomes the client’s documentation backlog.
Why a developer relations agency backs circuits over ads
The comparison comes down to what each dollar leaves behind. Ads buy attention that expires. A circuit buys artifacts that keep working.
| Channel | Unit of output | Feedback speed | What remains afterward |
|---|
| Hackathon circuit | Working prototypes on the API | Same weekend | Sample apps and friction logs |
| Paid developer ads | Signups, few ever calling the API | Weeks of analytics lag | Spend reports |
| Conference booth | Badge scans | Days, mostly small talk | A lead list |
| In-house DevRel hire | Program ownership at a six-figure salary | Months of ramp time | Institutional memory |
Every row except the first measures interest. The circuit measures completed integrations, and completed integrations are the number a payments company bills against.
The business case is older than the buzzword
Postman’s State of the API Report, an annual survey of API practitioners, found 74 percent of respondents working API-first in 2024. The buyer pool keeps widening.
Twilio proved the logic early. Around 2015 it raised a three-word billboard over Highway 101, Ask Your Developer, betting that builders steer purchasing decisions. Agencies still pitch that story.
Circuits also produce marketing raw material. Demo clips land on X within hours of judging, then vanish just as fast once student accounts go quiet.
Agencies archive that footage with sssTwitter, a twitter video downloader free of sign-ups that saves posts in HD straight from the browser, and fold the clips into case studies.
For a founder weighing an agency retainer, one test settles it. If strangers cannot ship on your API in a single caffeinated weekend, advertising will not rescue it.
A circuit surfaces that verdict early, at a fraction of the cost of a bad senior hire, and hands you the fix list along with it.
