2 posts tagged with "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

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​

1. For Utility
2. For Fun
3. 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:

1. Google play console discussion group
2. Some AI platform discussion group
3. Cross-platform dev tech group
4. …

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)​

1. Focus on data science and tech in practice
2. No random discussion
3. Periodical sharing and meetup, e.g.
4. Intro to Tableau data visualization
5. Hands-on Spark Python
6. Building an ML Model from Scratch
7. Business Writing
8. Computer Vision Industry Frontline
9. …

What kinds of discussions happen in the group?

1. Article sharing and discussion
2. Job opportunities (posting resume + hiring session)
3. QA: Tech problems / solutions / best practices in daily work
4. Theories and concepts
5. 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.

1. 501c3 nonprofit
2. QA
3. no politics, religion, or other controversial topics

What kinds of discussions happen in the group?

1. QA (career, programming, machine learning, system design, coding challenges)
2. moderation
3. resume review
4. ask a manager
5. meetups

Blockchain and dev community​

Challenges​

1. Utility value.
2. Unverified market segment.
3. Align topics with the company's growth.
4. 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:
  1. distributed systems
  2. blockchain
  3. IoT
  4. DApp
  5. FinTech
  6. 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

1. prepare ten engineering blogs first and write / post one per week.
2. moderate Discord and WeChat groups on distributed systems, blockchain, IoT, DApp, FinTech, SCM, and so on.
   1. launch campaigns among study groups and forums
   2. kindly share with our techie friends and groups
   3. online + offline events with our tech partners
3. trial and error by providing high-value contents and launching campaigns