How to build developer community?

What doesn't work?

• Throwing money at the problem
  • Sponsor a hackathon without proper docs that help devs to get started.
  • Not seeding your community with ideas & examples
• Build excellent tools but tells no one about them and how to use them.
  • Assuming you have provided ==enough context== in your contents
• Spend too much time on low-leverage work like answering questions

What works?

• Set clear goals: foster apps, integrations, mutual help, and word-of-mouth built with your tech.
  • a system of new useful apps built on top of your tech
  • integrations between your tech and existing products
  • helping other devs in your community
  • telling their friends about your tech
• Provide useful content: Libraries, APIs, docs, tools, smart contracts, education, etc.
• Establish long-term relationships: tutorials, videos, podcasts, workshops, meetups.
• Ride the hype: explain how your tech works with the popular tech and dev tools.
• Create superstars in your community.

How to improve docs?

• Improving docs is high-leverage work.

  • ==Every minute spent making your docs better is worth an hour of answering individual questions - stack overflow.==

• Understand your developer personas.

  • Listen to your customers every day.
  • Categorize your customers.

• Developer's questions are useful clues to improve your doc.

How to categorize your developers?

Segment by skill level - seeing the table of skill levels to what they need:

skill levels	Docs	Tooling	Tutorials / Examples
Beginner	Quickstarts	SDK, simple libs	Frontend code, zero-to-hero video series
Intermediate	Reference Docs, topic-sorted guides	type annotations, dev console/studio	Full-fledged example apps
Advanced	A library of ideas we’d like to see built	mini accelerator / grants	Primitives as building blocks for larger apps

Segment by role / intent

Role	Value
hackathon / indie dev	mediate
dev from an integration partner	mediate
future founder	high

How to support superstars in your community?

• Make them feel special and highlighted
• Promote what they are doing
• Create sharing opportunities for them to reach border community

How to run a better hackathon?

• Know your customer - are they willing to build on your tech?
• Know your co-sponsor - are they as high quality as you?
• Know how to get started - people are unprepared, having limited time, and over-whelmed by your and others' techs

How to run a better bounty?

• It doesn't work to Incentivise people to do simple and stupid tasks.
• What works is to make productive and derivative improvements.
  • Get smart devs to develop something new
  • Crowdsource tutorials and educational content

What do you mean by useful content?

• periordical sharing
  • web3 research
  • tech deep dive
• official websites/doc/demo
• articles to various channels