Introducing crowd.dev 👋

Hello, World! 🌎

I have been working with developer-facing companies over the last few years. One thing that really stood out to me was that the way successful dev companies experience growth really differs from traditional companies. It always seems like they are driven by some magical superpower. And I am not talking about a strong sales force, fancy marketing collaterals or outstanding branding… the single most important driver for success is... *drumroll*... the COMMUNITY!

In this sense, “community” does not simply mean a big social media following. A community stands for a group of developers that share a set of common beliefs and behaviors (e.g. workflows) and take on a common identity (just think about all these Golang Gophers). Instead of consuming one-to-many communication, communities consist of endless many-to-many connections. Active community members support each other, help develop the product and are the best brand ambassadors one could wish for. And the impact of communities has been tremendous. Kubernetes, Ethereum, Stripe - all of them are built on the foundation of a strong and vibrant developer community. No wonder that B2B software companies are looking for ways to build communities by themselves.

We were all the more amazed when we discovered that there are surprisingly few best practices and tools for developer community building. DevRels, developer marketeers and community managers are left pretty much to their own luck. According to the State of Developer Relations Report 2020, 63% of DevRels rely on custom in-house tools and spreadsheets to manage their communities, while most of the rest are misusing marketing and social media tools. We are convinced that community building will be one of the most important activities for developer-facing companies in the next decade. Professionals in this field should have access to the same quality and variety of tooling as their colleagues in the sales and marketing departments.

We are convinced that community building will be one of the most important activities for developer-facing companies in the next decade.

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This is why we built Crowd.dev. 

With Crowd.dev, we are on the mission to build the “brain” for developer community building. We want to enable community builders to measure, understand and grow their developer communities based on data-backed insights. 🤖 

So what exactly can you expect from Crowd.dev? 

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1️. Measure: All community data in one place.

First of all, we bring light to the shadow of your community data jungle. We build 20+ integrations into all relevant developer platforms - think Twitter, GitHub, Stackoverflow, etc.. Data sources that are not integrated yet, can easily be added via our OpenAPI. Once we have all the relevant data on your community members and their activities, we create powerful KPIs for your community building efforts (e.g. your “community health score”).

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2️. Understand: Get to the heart of what makes your community tick.

The heart of Crowd.dev is the data cockpit. Here, all data points flow together and you can review analysis in the form of various diagrams and reports. Especially exciting is our community building “ROI score”: We track the activities you undertake to grow your community and show you the impact they have had. This way you can prove to all stakeholders what your work and activities bring every day. In addition, you have the opportunity to benchmark your community against comparable communities in the dashboard.

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3️. Grow: Build your community at scale.

Last but not least Crowd.dev helps you to actually build your community. First of all, we analyze your members and find lookalikes developers who you could approach in the future. Furthermore, we suggest community building activities based on what has made other communities successful. And on top of that, you can organize and actually execute many community activities right on our platform. 

Crowd.dev covers the leg-work for community building, so you can focus on building relationships instead of API integrations and spreadsheets.

Sounds exciting and you want to get involved?

Register for our free beta and be the first one to get unparalleled insights on your dev community.

Apply for one of our various engineering positions. The company will be remote-first so any locations are welcome.

Also feel free to get in touch with my via jr@crowd.dev or LinkedIn.