Building a developer community isn't easy, but doable and rewarding
Hey Indiehackers,
I'd like to share a summary of the latest episode of the Software Engineering Unlocked podcast with you.
I interviewed Sandeep Panda, the CEO, and founder of Hashnode about how and why he started this developer community, and how he develops the software that fuels this community place.
**If you want to listen to this episode, you might not want to read the summary, because it might spoil the experience for you. **
So, turns out, Sandeep was already building side-project while at university, but without serious intent to make a business out of this. He realized that he really has to start his own business just after starting to work after graduating.
Luckily, during university he met his co-founder and together, they started to build a place for developers to discuss opinionated questions. Questions, that weren't allowed at Stackoverflow.
After launching it on ProductHunt, they quickly realized, that they had traction and so the started to look for a venture capital firm to invest.
Their strategy to secure funding was to work their way into the VC firm, which he explains in the podcast. Long story short, they were able to get funding but made a few failed pivot attempts that they luckily could recover from.
Their current focus is the build a blogging platform for developers that helps devs monetize their knowledge.
The biggest learning from this episode are:
- University is a great place to meet your co-founder. Building a few projects together beforehand helps to understand if you can pull off a startup together.
- Research your VC firm well to understand if they invest in companies like you.
- If you found a great fitting investor firm, the support they provide is beyond money. It is their network and their business knowledge that is invaluable.
- If you want to build a community, then you should always focus on keeping the community safe and lively. 70% of the effort goes into community building, not software development.
I really enjoyed talking with Sandeep, and I hope this little summary is helpful too! If you're interested in hearing the full story, I'm surely happy if you listen to the episode here.
Hey - I like the summary! Anything that mentions community always lures me in :)
Looking at the podcast page, you've included the questions you ask. This is cool, I guess great for SEO too. Is this a common thing for podcasts? I haven't seen it, but honestly I normally just listen to podcasts via my phone/spotify so haven't been checking if podcasts do it.
Also, what's the admin process like for curating the questions/content? Do you write them down as you go? Have them all pre-prepped?
One day I may start a podcast and am really curious to see how people approach things in a different way :)
Hey Rosie,
I actually wanted to have a full transcript, but as I did it semi-automatic after the fact, only my speech was detected in a good enough stage that I could correct it and publish it. That's why there is only my question in the transcript ;-).
I only prepare the first question of each interview. All the others follow from the conversation. That said, I prepare by researching the background of the person I'll talk to. I read articles written by them, watch videos of them (if available), and if I can't find a lot, I might have a quick precall with them to better understand what we will be talking about.