How to Build and Grow a Developer Community

During my 10+ years in developer marketing, I've built communities and managed one with 500,000 monthly active developers. I've seen what works, what doesn't, and what's outright snake oil. I am writing this piece so that you don’t trip over the same rocks I did.

Most YC Startups Have a Dead Discord

YC founders are taught that the first thing they need to do is start a developer community on Discord. And almost all of those Discord servers turn out to be graveyards, visited only by users who need instant help or engineers developing the tool.

When you get in there, you can almost hear the crickets. Nobody is starting topics and there are few genuine conversations. The only activity is when someone needs help. They show up, ask their question, get unblocked, and leave.

Most of these communities exist for one reason only: because every other dev tool has one. Founders launch them without ever stopping to ask why.

Support Channel Problem

When developers join your Discord, their intention isn’t to randomly chat and connect with you and your team. They are there to get unblocked.

That is the normal starting point. Please don’t treat it as a failure.

It actually takes three to five instances of getting real value before someone shifts from the this is a place to ask questions to this is a place I want to spend time mindset. Before they start caring about the product and the team behind it, they simply need to have a lot more interaction with you and the rest of the users.

Truth be told, most companies never get there. The community becomes a support channel and stays a support channel forever.

What Communities Actually Are

A community is not a marketing/sales channel or a place to ask people to upvote you on LinkedIn. Nobody cares about your LinkedIn on Discord.

A community is a knowledge source.

I lurk in client Discords before I write a content strategy for them. I find topic ideas I would never have thought of on my own. I see how users actually talk about the product. I discover use cases that would never have crossed my mind.

A user from an unexpected background using the tool in a way nobody predicted: that’s gold. And you can stumble upon it in your community, too, as long as you are paying attention.

Business Maturity Problem

The reason most developer communities fail is a lack of business maturity.

People need to understand that a Discord is not for engineers only, nor is it just a support channel. If you are responsible for growth, you should be there. If you are doing marketing, you should be there. If you’re in sales, you’ve guessed it: you should be there. Not to sell. To learn.

I call it passive learning. You watch what people are talking about and see how they address certain problems. That way, you discover what they find important and then use that information to make better decisions everywhere else in the business.

But most teams don’t do this. The community sits in a silo, and only DevRel or support sees what is happening.

Be Aware of the Snake Oil Grifters

I have seen consultants do all sorts of things I don’t personally agree with, and at Literally, we never approve of these cheap tricks.

Some people buy GitHub stars. Others game them through sponsored hackathons. Part of the deal is you have to star the repo; otherwise, you’re not allowed to participate and potentially get an award. Overnight, they get a spike in stars, and then they report it as growth.

But you know what those stars are? Students from universities who will never use your product. They are not pushing your community forward or building things.

They are not your users.

This is not growth.

Growth is when a junior developer, who is just starting out, builds something real with your tool. Growth is when they come back and when they start helping other people in your community figure things out. But that requires knowing what growth actually means for your business. And when I ask founders what it means to them, I watch them go dumbfounded.

Do you want users? Do you want them to return? Or is it money that you’re after? These are all different things, and you have to define what you are actually trying to achieve before you start.

DevRel Problem

I have worked with DevRel people who are incredibly creative. They have great ideas and amazing energy, but there’s no clear why behind what they are doing.

And that’s the problem. You can have the most creative idea, the best-looking video, the most engaging content, but if you do not know why you are doing it, what is the point?

DevRel teams need direction, not just permission to be creative. Someone has to connect their work to what the business actually needs. Otherwise, you get activity without outcomes.

This is why everyone on the team needs to understand what the company is actually trying to achieve and how their work connects to it. Something as simple as OKRs or a higher-level marketing strategy should have answers to these questions.

Another way to tackle this is to monitor your website performance and identify which channels are bringing in customers, not just views. This is how you move away from vanity metrics and start playing the growth game.

What Actually Works for Discord

The team at YC’s Wasp uses the Kapa bot on Discord, which answers questions from the documentation. The key feature of Kapa is that it can say "I don't know" when it doesn’t have enough knowledge or when it hasn’t been trained on a certain topic.

This has been a game-changer for them. It has offloaded the support burden, so engineers are no longer exhausted from answering the same questions over and over. And it has freed them up to interact with users in other channels, where conversations revolve around brainstorming and ideas, not "How does this work?" and "Why is this broken?"

When the people building the product can actually engage with users as collaborators instead of constantly putting out fires, that’s when the community starts to evolve into something more than a support channel.

The following video is a half-hour-long podcast about the specific ways you can grow your community:

Tough Business Question

Before you start following other people’s best practices, ask yourself, “What am I trying to achieve?” You need to do this before launching a Discord, hiring your first DevRel, or doing anything that touches community. Define your business expectations first, and act second!

And just to be clear, "Everyone else has one!" is not the right response to this. Nor is "It will help with our growth." What specifically are you trying to accomplish? Who are you trying to reach? What do you want them to do after they join?

If you cannot answer those questions, you’re on the path to another dead Discord.

How Literally Helps

Literally is a developer marketing agency that doesn't do the stuff I just warned you about. If you're trying to figure out community, content, or DevRel and want to talk to people who've actually run these programs, reach out!

P.S. The artwork used for this blog post is 100% human and original.

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