I described in my last post what makes and defines a developer community. If you are a developer wanting to run a developer community, or you work in developer relations (DevRel) and you are managing a developer community, what do you need to do in order for that community to thrive? Whilst the topic of this article is "building" a developer community, many of the principles outlined here apply whether you are building a community from scratch, or you're taking over an existing community and looking to maintain and grow that community.
Building a developer community or managing a DevRel program requires a fundamental mindset shift from the usual marketing terminology that you might see when it comes to Sales and Marketing. TL;DR, developers don't want to be marketed to. They want tools and environments that help them build better, faster, and safer. Because of this, there are a few things to keep in mind when building and managing a developer community:
Ditch the fluff
Developers reject abstract, pie-in-the-sky promises. Speak directly to the specific technical pain points they face when shipping software. When you empower developers to solve hard problems without compromise, they don't just use your product. They'll become advocates for the ideas behind it.
Don't be that company that talks at developers. This will often leave them feeling frustrated and questioning the validity of the product or service.
Offer real value
Don't just provide cheap SWAG as a way to "engage" your developer community. If your advocacy program relies solely on dodgy stickers and cheap t-shirts, you will fail to retain high-caliber contributors. Move toward high-value incentives, such as:
- Direct access to internal engineering and product teams
- Early access to private betas and roadmap discussions
- Conference speaking opportunities and travel stipends
- High-quality, exclusive swag that shows genuine appreciation
Select for helpfulness over follower counts
If you are running a formal DevRel program, it's important to find the right people. Don't chase developers or community members with vanity follower metrics. Look for authentic, skilled builders with a history of helping others—developers who answer forum posts, write tutorials, organise meetups, and provide detailed bug reports. You want to find the people who are authentic, and have a genuine interest and appreciation for your product or service.
Measure what actually matters
When it comes to looking at the success of your developer community—either a formal DevRel program, or general developer community—don't just look at high level members. Total member counts, whilst a good general indicator, shouldn't be used as your primary success metric. Instead, measure ecosystem health:
- Active Contributor Ratio: The balance of active versus passive members
- Support & Unblocking: How effectively feedback routes to product teams and how quickly peers resolve issues
- Sentiment & Safety: Low toxicity indicators, strong Code of Conduct enforcement, and positive member feedback
- Multi-Tier Retention: Retention rates across passive members, active contributors, and formal ambassadors
These will give you a much better indication of whether your community is doing well and responding to the opportunities you are providing.
Practical tips for building a community
Okay, so now you have a good overview of what it means to have a great community. What does that look like in practice? Let's look at some practical tips on building out your community. Many of these tips apply whether you are building an online, in-person, or hybrid community.
Welcoming and onboarding
As an organiser or leader of a community, one of the best things you can do is be welcoming to new members. You want to create a positive experience for those that come to your community, so start off on the right foot. From an IRL perspective, this could mean greeting newcomers to a meetup, connecting them to senior members of the community for guidance, and making sure they feel comfortable.
When it comes to online, you can take a more formal approach. Discord servers and Slack workspaces often have welcoming or onboarding tools to help new members get started. For example, your Discord server might require new members to read and agree to the rules, or join certain channels.
You can select onboarding through Discord:
Rules and guidelines
No community can run effectively without rules and guidelines in place. Outlining the rules, regulations, policies, and codes of conduct from the beginning will ensure your community runs smoothly. In a practical sense, this will mean ensuring that if you are running an in-person event, require attendees to agree to the Code of Conduct upon signing up for the event. For live-streamed and online events, having the rules and guidelines upon check in is a good idea.
For online communities that have channels like Discord, Slack, or Reddit, make sure your rules are clearly visible and remind members to adhere to them when engaging within the community. Having moderators and enforcers to ensure these rules are followed is a key component of a community, and there should be consequences for not following the guidelines.
The DotNet Discord server has a great list of rules that each member must read when coming to the community:
Make sure your community is active
There's nothing worse than getting excited about the prospect of joining a new community, only to arrive at the sound of crickets. If a community isn't active, people are likely to leave. Some practical things you can do to ensure your community is active include:
- Welcome new people
- Respond to comments and content
- Ensure channels and threads are populated (for an online community, make sure your channels are lively. This could mean pulling in an RSS feed or auto-bots to help populate useful information)
- Take feedback onboard and pass onto the right channels
- Ensure everyone gets a say: don't just always have the same meetup speakers, don't always answer a certain person's questions. Give everyone the time
The Twilio Discord Server is usually fairly active:
Organise information in a consistent manner
No matter what kind of community you are running, having information available in a consistent and intuitive way will help your community. In a practical sense this could be:
- Having an online space where people can gather: Discord, Slack, Reddit, GitHub Discussions etc.
- Having channels and threads in your online communities that encourage certain actions, ie. "read this", "support" (for a support channel), "python" (for a channel all about python)
- Posting your meetups and webinars on a channel that developers use, such as Meetup.com or Luma
- Hosting your Code of Conduct on an easily accessible website (or printing it out at a live event)
This can also mean organising your members in a way that makes sense for other members of the community. For example, when you go to a live event, attendees have badges with their name, and usually their status; such as "exhibitor", "sponsor", "speaker". This helps identify key community members. You can do this in an online sense too. Utilise things like Discord tags or Reddit flairs to help identify specific community members.
By utilising a flair here, we can see this was posted by a developer relations person at Twilio:
Go and build
Now you have some practical tips around managing and running a developer community. I hope this is insightful, and if you have tips to share, post them in the comments, or let me know which ones helped you the most.
For the developers out there, make sure you check out my article on finding and making the most of developer communities.
