🧑🤝🧑Community and Support
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A community brings people together with shared interests and goals. Developer communities, whether on Discord, Slack, Reddit, GitHub, or at events, are places for learning, sharing ideas, and building software together.
Why should you care? A strong community can be a powerful tool for solving problems and driving innovation. It supports bottom-up adoption, helping with customer acquisition, retention, and engagement. Developer communities also provide unique insights into user needs, aiding in product-market fit. Companies like Figma, Notion, GitLab, and Stripe owe much of their success to their communities.
Start Small, Grow Slow - Starting a Discord or Slack server doesn’t instantly create a community. Early on, you need to put in the effort to build it.
Be Intentional from the Start - Align your community with your business goals. For example, if you want users to generate content, your interactions will differ from encouraging developers to share best practices.
Consider:
What do your target developers need?
How can your community provide value to them?
Is the focus on support content, product info, or contributions to an open-source project?
Get the Whole Team Involved - Everyone on your team, including the founders, should actively participate in the community. This engagement fosters a sense of authenticity and ensures that the community feels supported and valued.
Top Platforms for Developer Communities
Discord
Slack
Reddit
GitHub
Twitter
LinkedIn
Forums
Nurture and Grow Your Community with Content - Your community will also be a great source for future content. If you keep close tabs on everything going on in your community, you’ll be able to identify what types of content are still missing and are being requested.
Provide Support and Gather Feedback - One of the main purposes of a community is to offer support and gather feedback. Being actively involved shows users that you are committed to helping them solve their problems. A responsive and helpful community can create champions who advocate for your product.
Build Authentic Relationships
As a founder, your goal is to boost engagement and grow your community. Here’s how:
Highlight valuable members: Share their stories in blog posts or podcasts.
Implement a rewards system: Use statuses, points, badges, or awards.
Offer SWAG or free services: Show appreciation through branded merchandise or services.
Host Events
Online Events: Webinars, hackathons.
In-Person Events: Conferences, pizza and beer nights.
Expert Speakers: Live coding tutorials or project showcases.
Regular Schedule: Host events regularly, ideally monthly, to keep the community engaged.
Encourage Community-Led Events - Once relationships are established, let members organize their own events. This personalizes the community experience and aligns with members' needs.
Value Founding Members
Special Events: Host dinners or private Zoom calls.
Exclusive Perks: Offer SWAG, discounts, and exclusive privileges.
Feedback and Involvement: Regularly seek their feedback and involve them in hosting events.
Example: ToolJet hosts various sessions for their Slack community
Here's the best actionable guide for building a community from scratch:
Your task as a founder is to increase engagement and grow your community. You can do this by recognizing valuable members and giving them the limelight they deserve. For example, you can hand out kudos, and share individual member stories in a blog post or a podcast.
If you want to go above and beyond, you can implement a rewards system: statuses, points, badges of honour, or even give out awards. This will motivate your members to contribute productively and make them feel appreciated. SWAG or free services are also a great way of winning people over - who doesn’t love a good hoodie?
Events for Community Building:
Events play a crucial role in Dhiwise's growth strategy. Vishal and his team actively participate in industry events, webinars, and conferences to connect with their audience.
"We make it a priority to attend and sponsor relevant developer conferences and meetups. These events provide us with valuable opportunities to connect with potential users, gather feedback, and establish ourselves as thought leaders in the space."
Moreover, Vishal frequently delivers talks and workshops at these events, sharing insights into industry trends, best practices, and innovative solutions. He explains,
"Giving talks allows us to showcase our expertise and demonstrate the value of our product in a tangible way. It's not about pitching - we're trying to be as authentic as we can"
Building community with PIZZA: The Jam.pizza story
Launching Jam.Pizza is Jam's way of taking community engagement to the next level.
It all started with a series of in-person events where Jam got to meet the builders face-to-face. From London to San Francisco, these gatherings have been invaluable for learning from engineers working on groundbreaking projects. But Jam wanted to do more—to extend their support to engineering communities in even more places.
Enter Jam.Pizza. This initiative makes it simple for meetup organizers to apply for sponsorship to cover the pizza at their events. It's a small gesture with a big impact, showing that Jam is invested in supporting grassroots tech communities worldwide.
Read more:
In addition to Jam.Pizza, the company frequently hosts and sponsors events that cater to generic developer and founder meetups. Here's an example:
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