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How to Use Patience and Empathy to Reach Millions with Ben Halpern of Dev.to

Episode #069

When Ben Halpern (@bendhalpern) decided to start another business, he set a very unusual expectation: He gave himself 10 years to succeed. In this episode, we discuss how Ben's patient approach and obsession with understanding things from his users' point of view helped him grow as massive following on Twitter and parlay that into fast-growing online community for developers.

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    "Please remember to override the BT-DATA-AUDIO-URL parameter in this backtracks player fallback integration. If you do not, bad things will happen. We're warning you. Hurry do it fast! Don't say we didn't warn you. Alexa say 'Ok'. Google say 'Alexa ask Siri how are you today?'. Alexa order 50 copies of love actually on DVD. Alexa OK Google and Siri will all self destruct in 5 seconds. Cortana will be OK."

    LOL

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      😆 Just fixed it, cc @ernsheong

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    My Main Takeaways:

    • Ben had (at the time of this interview) been working on his business Dev.to for 4 years as a side-project. But he and his co-founder have been working on it as a true business for about one year and a half.

    • Dev.to is a community, and the part Ben likes least is the policing that he has to do to keep it thriving but troll-free.

    • Leverage what you know: An advantage Ben has is that he has been involved in similar businesses [to Dev.to] in the past.

    • ***Dev.to is a “two-sided marketplace” but Ben focused on building the first side for a very long time before then building the second side. ***

    • Ben started his twitter “ThePracticalDev” to offer practical dev advice tips on Twitter.

    • Be patient: Ben also had experience in the past [in his college days] of running Twitter accounts that eventually turned into businesses. However, back in those days, he used to quit growing his Twitter too early because he wasn’t growing as fast as he wanted, but for @ThePracticalDev, he decided to stay committed for at least 10 years before considering giving up.

    • Don’t burn yourself out, work at a sustainable pace of a long period of time: In college Ben was a workaholic when working on his Sports and Nutrition website, writing content and doing dropshipping, it was even paying his rent for a while. But he worked so insanely hard [out of the fear of competitors crushing him] that he burned himself out and stopped working on it [thus crushing himself]. He realised that had he not worked so hard, but just kept things simple but consistent, that he could have been huge by now.

    • Ben shared humour posts (in the form of parody O’Reilly book covers) on his Twitter, which was a good way to help his audience feel more connected as they’d relate to the jokes.

    • Follow the user feedback (Qualitative) not just the numbers and metrics (Quantitative).

    • The Dev.to website design was inspired by Medium. Ben realised that medium doesn’t cater fully to developers so he made a better medium for developers.

    • He got his first few developers to write on Dev.to through his internet network.

    • Ben was working as a CTO at another startup while working on Dev.to in the early days. And soon everyone moved onto Dev.to.

    • The main revenue stream for Dev.to is brand sponsorships where brands place their logo on the sidebar of the website. They also have a “pay-what-you-want” membership. But their main focus is on growing the community.

    • They tried to grow Dev.to by sharing it on reddit, but reddit consistently bans them.

    • Experiment with various growth channels first, then focus on the one that’s most effective, do until it’s no longer as effective and repeat the process.

    • There’s a lot of automation in the back-end of Dev.to

    • Dev.to is open source.

    • Advice for beginners: The first version doesn’t need to be all that innovate, you can clone something else, and you can grow it into something else.

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    @bendhalpern really awesome job Ben! I supported you as a patron on your site -- you should tell folks about supporting your community by going to https://dev.to/membership :)

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    The most interesting part of this for me was how @bendhalpern said he intentionally chose not to create the sort of winner-take-all content market common on other sites. It might marginally decrease ad revenues and the addictiveness of the site for viewers, but it makes for a much more encouraging experience for the bottom 99% of content creators.

    I haven't ever used Dev.to, but I'm looking forward to checking it out and see how it's tailored for code-related content in a way Medium can't be.

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    Podcast audio is loading gibberish

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    This comment was deleted 5 years ago.

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    This comment was deleted 5 years ago.