Episode description

Growing a developer community is something that many SaaS founders think about in the new age of selling low priced software to line-of-business (LOB) employees at the Fortune 500 all the way down to the hacker in her garage building the next Twitter. There have been great successes already accessing and growing a developer community with companies such as Heroku, Wordpress, Twilio, and Shopify now being household names in this ecosystem. One of the earliest and most noticeable companies to grow this trend was MongoDB. In this week's podcast, we bring on our friend Meghan Gill to discuss exactly how to think about growing a developer community. Meghan is well known in the circles that care the most about building developer communities and was employee #8 and the first non-technical marketing hire at the company. She's spent 6+ years perfecting the art of creating a developer community and now runs an organization that includes MongoDB User Groups, MongoDB conferences, social media, online engagement and education, email marketing, and more. We started the discussion talking about the foundation that any founder needs to put in place before they even think about embarking on growing a developer community. Most folks wing this and just start selling to get some traction without understanding how they are going to grow their community. Meghan gives us the toolkit and playbook for how to correctly think about this. From there, we dive into the first steps and what can be an effective and low cost way of creating an initial developer community. We then dive into actually growing a developer community and touch on some of the specific areas like events, user groups, and marketing efforts that tend to work or not work. Meghan and I close the discussion with some thoughts on what she's learned throughout her lengthy time at MongoDB and how to set yourself up