How to build an engaging developer community 🍕

A developer community around your business means two things,

(a) You are making it easy for developers to build an application on top of your platform.
(b) You are providing support to the engineering effort in setting up your solution.

On one hand, you need to provide the necessary help documentation but where you can also ensure more value is by giving them a place where people can ask questions and help each other. If you ensure the previous questions are answered and easily found with a search, then voila you increase the reusable value of the content.

Fortunately, there are a lot of ways to do this.

As discussed in one of my previous posts, the developer community requires a bit of collaborative style to be adopted. Your number one goal is to make it easy for your clients to use your services, or build and run their application on top of your platform. You may also need to create some canned resources like tutorial videos, online courses, etc., depending upon the product/market you serve (I will leave it to you to judge, Hint: ask your customers)

Now we need a plan to incentivize the developers to not just question but help others as well. Allow any of your customers to create and publish unofficial help docs inside your community and reward them with recognition with a special post. Maybe pin their post once in a while and drive traffic to the site they are working on.

Ensure, a question posted see answers in the short period of time, and keep the discussion focused. The answers to these questions may evolve in time, so better use a forum thread like a discussion rather than real-time chats. If you have your team ready to spare time every day answering questions, then you are already got a starting point.

Discover some of the frequently asked questions and move them to a separate channel or category, making the life of newbie easier. Ensure people are notified about new comments and replies -- I have seen a failure to do this as a common problem in many dead communities.

Now that you have a few ideas to try, I will tell you how to measure the success of your developer community.

(a) Number of developers joined the community
(b) How many installations/Apps that they have built since the launch of your community
(c) How quick has it become to use your solution
(d) Referral traffic to your product (developers talk to other developers)

Create a subdomain, say developer(dot)yourwebsite(dot)com - get started with your community.

Let's grow side by side. Say hello in my website chat if you are there 👋