How to run a tech community?
Why do people need the tech community?
The composition of your tech knowledge intake
Perception of Value-frequency
In addition to disclosing the unknown unknown, the community discussions creating values in accessibility, building connections, and novelty.
Group Discussion | Published Contents | |
---|---|---|
accessibility | low | high |
building connections | more | less |
novelty | high | low |
Case study: Value Proposition of Tech Communities
- For Utility
- For Fun
- For Career Growth
1. For Utility
Wechaty: a Bot SDK for Wechat Individual Account
Two-layer Biz Structure:
To Business | Social CRM, AI-powered Chatbot |
---|---|
To Developer | Bot SDK and Service Token |
Other examples:
- Google play console discussion group
- Some AI platform discussion group
- Cross-platform dev tech group
- …
2. For Fun
Discussion groups for specific topics posted in a popular online forum could attract hundreds of people once.
e.g., Blockchain Random Discussion Group
3. For Career Growth
Ex1. Seattle Data Science in Practice Group (WeChat 500)
- Focus on data science and tech in practice
- No random discussion
- Periodical sharing and meetup, e.g.
- Intro to Tableau data visualization
- Hands-on Spark Python
- Building an ML Model from Scratch
- Business Writing
- Computer Vision Industry Frontline
- …
What kinds of discussions happen in the group?
- Article sharing and discussion
- Job opportunities (posting resume + hiring session)
- QA: Tech problems / solutions / best practices in daily work
- Theories and concepts
- Corporate ladder
Ex2. CS Career Hackers (Discord 1000+)
CSCH is a community ranging from learners to experienced software engineers who come together to discuss programming, interviewing, career advancement, and, ultimately, how to be better engineers.
- 501c3 nonprofit
- QA
- no politics, religion, or other controversial topics
What kinds of discussions happen in the group?
- QA (career, programming, machine learning, system design, coding challenges)
- moderation
- resume review
- ask a manager
- meetups
Blockchain and dev community
Challenges
- Utility value.
- Unverified market segment.
- Align topics with the company's growth.
- Techies are not interested in generic marketing campaigns.
Solutions
- Engineering Blog - that can be subscribed and separated from generic marketing contents for investors.
- Discussion Groups - on Topics like:
- distributed systems
- blockchain
- IoT
- DApp
- FinTech
- SCM
- Weekly Tech Review - sharing experiences and resources
Why does it align with the company?
- brand-awareness - Like all the other engineering blogs, it helps the company build the engineering brand.
- conversion - user base for engaging and even conversion. e.g. Hubspot's inbound marketing.
- partnership - deepen the relationships with our dev partners by co-host online / offline events.
- private domain traffic / community economy - put our community dev tools (XRC20, XRC721) into wider audiences and grow with the private domain traffic
- use cases collect problems or use cases that developers meet in their daily work
How to initiate the effort for Blockchain companies?
Twitter + Engineering Blog + Discussion Groups
- prepare ten engineering blogs first and write / post one per week.
- moderate Discord and WeChat groups on distributed systems, blockchain, IoT, DApp, FinTech, SCM, and so on.
- launch campaigns among study groups and forums
- kindly share with our techie friends and groups
- online + offline events with our tech partners
- trial and error by providing high-value contents and launching campaigns