Best practice for building a dev community?

Jun Gong
2 replies
We've been building dev community for a little over a month. Our target is indie dapp developers (for now) and our goal is to get them together, share ideas, thoughts, and build stuff... online! We have groups on Telegram and Discord. We share similar content on those groups everyday -- looks like people on Telegram are more active. Also, we're planning on hosting online AMAs and workshops. So if you have a dev community, wonder what's the best practice for you to build the community? What's working and what's not? šŸ™

Replies

Badu Huang
Before I start my suggestions, I think we may need both vote to agree that building an "active" and "healthy" community really takes time. We need patiently find our members' needs and their focus(something like money, fame or they just want to join a big family and make some connections), and then satisfied them. After we understand our members(it takes more than half year in my experience, and if you stop for a while you will need to take more effect to re-boost this community, so never give up!), all we need to do is keeping "communicating"- 'What you like about our community?', 'What you think we could improve?' And then we improve again and again, until we finally get to know our members' feelings, thoughts and goal. When that time comes, it's time to build 'culture' in our community. It's not a restrict rules that bundle our members. More like a belief that how we value our community and what is the persona may look like in this community. Now let's start! If you are running your community from scratch, I think we should devide it into 3 stage. -first stage 1. Find an online platform or offline place to let people know your community is built here. 2. Outreach and connect with other communities to join you. It's really hard at the beginning, but keep this in mind "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." 3.Confirm your topic in community ASAP(don't be to vague cause eventually members will get distractions ) -second stage 1.Build exclusive content by your own(could be videos, articles even a infographic or build a reading club) that beneficent your existing members. Let them stick to your valuable content first. 2.Find core members they value your community and your content. That kind of core members might need fame, money, or the power that could control members. Listen and observe carefully. (Sometimes they don't have to be an existing hard supporter's of your community. Maybe they are KOLs in spectacular groups and they perform well and active. You need to find all these influence out of the box by yourself. To persuade them to join you and grow this community with you.) 3.Growth your community by influencers At this time, you might create valuable contents that no one knows cause it expands maybe to the wrong track our the range is little. Don't hesitate to scale your community by the influencers. They are the experts to tell people what's a valuable content. -third stage 1. Grow the scalability At this time, you might already have a huge members of community and find some great lead to arrange meetups, share contents, but that's not enough. Make a community's guideline to teach your members how to organize a meetup step by step. Let all the members know they could involve this community if they want. They could hold an event by their own. They could come up with cool ideas of creative contest. Just follow the guideline, and everything is great! 2.Ambassador program You need to keep this in mind: No one can promise he will stay in your community for the rest of his life. He might be busy in business so he left. Make sure you could find the fresh members to run this big family together 3.Global Unity Don't limit your community in a comfort-zone. Expand it online first it's ok, and ask all the influencers and ambassadors help. They definitely will come up with great ideas.