What's up, everyone?
This is Cortland from ndhackers.com, and you're listening to the Indie Hackers podcast.
On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense
of what it's like to be in their shoes.
How did they get to where they are today?
How did they make decisions, both at their companies and in their personal lives?
And what makes their businesses tick?
Today I'm talking to Ben Halpern, the founder of Dev2.
Ben, welcome to the show, and thanks for joining me.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Cortland.
Dev2 is an online community for programmers where programmers can go to swap ideas and
help each other grow.
Is that an accurate description?
Yeah, I think that describes it.
We act sort of as a social network, a professional network for software developers, but the way
coders really want to get together and interact really is about their craft, their ideas, and
stuff like that.
So we really just try to be there for the humans behind the scenes.
As you know, I also run an online community for indie hackers, for basically developers
who want to learn how to start companies.
So this is super fun for me to be able to have you on this show and really just pick
your brain about everything you're doing related to your community.
But first, let's talk about some of the basics behind Dev2.
How long have you been working on this, and who are you working with?
Yeah, so it's kind of amazing how long it's been at this point.
Since I started working on this project in any capacity, it's been about four years,
but we've been working on it sort of as a true earnest business for about a year and
a half.
And there was probably another year squeaked in there when I was taking it quite a bit
more seriously.
So about two and a half years since I really started thinking it could be a really cool,
great thing, and about a year and a half since we sort of officially thought of it as a real
like, this is our company, our startup, our business.
This is an actual business.
What are some of the ways you measure your progress at this point?
Are you tracking how many members you have for your community?
How many page views you're getting?
How much revenue you're generating?
Yeah, so I think we track a lot of the same stuff any other sort of internet entity has
in terms of expected daily users, daily sort of metrics as they grow and stuff like that.
But I don't think we're, from a business strategy perspective, the most metric driven company
in the world.
If we can cause a lot of really great anecdotal stories, a lot of success, just have an idea
that the mechanics are really working for people.
I wouldn't say that we're this sort of organization that drives too hard on numbers and stuff,
but we do sort of track everything, so happy to chat about all that stuff.
Yeah, what are some of those metrics that you track, just to give listeners some context
as to where Dev2 is and its growth?
Yeah, so in terms of registered users, we have nearing, depending on when this podcast
comes out, maybe nearing about 100,000 registered developers on the platform.
And we're currently going to get about 1.5 million unique visitors to the site.
And those numbers are pretty far off, because you can use the website as a lurker, as an
information seeker just on your own.
So a subset of folks have really joined and become part of the community, and then a much
bigger selection of software developers are using it in some capacity to get their job
done to kind of keep up with the scene and stuff like that.
That's huge.
And a year and a half, really, of taking this seriously with your co-founders.
Is that 1.5 million uniques total or yearly or monthly?
Per month.
Cool.
Yeah, that's humongous.
Congratulations.
Yeah, and it's really been picking up like crazy lately.
This I think at the start of the spring, it was less than half of that, or not the start,
like the end of the spring, like just a few months ago, we've been really tracking about
15% to 20% growth in that area for several months in a row now.
And we've really started to grow on top of ourselves.
You know, like that really hit that inflection point, which is really, really incredibly
fun.
Yeah, it sounds like it.
We're definitely going to dive in to exactly what went into that growth spurt.
I talked to Ryan Hoover recently, the creator of another online community called Product
Hunt.
And I asked him, what are your favorite parts of running an online community?
And what are your least favorite parts?
So let me ask you the same thing, Ben, what do you like most about running an online community?
And what do you like the least?
My favorite and least favorite things about the process and the whole community thing,
and I think you can probably relate to some of this, is the two sides of the coin in terms
of like magical collaboration and then just trying to keep things healthy, keep toxicity
out of the community, encourage healthy debates while discouraging pedantic arguments, things
like that.
And this is really our, you know, really our highest level of focus on anything is just
can we keep people in the mindset of encouraging one another instead of tearing each other
down?
That's kind of the whole point of the business was to improve on what seemed like not the
best we could do as humans who write code.
So the best part is the magic that comes out of our efforts and the worst part is kind
of the day to day grind or any sort of times we let the wrong kind of conversations happen.
Like we really just need to let things flow naturally.
We can't really tell people what to do, but we can really do everything we can to avoid
toxic behavior, harassment, anything that's unbecoming of our community.
And the two sides of that coin are the best part of the whole job and the worst part and
anytime we get feedback, like people are really amazed and appreciative of how hard we work
about on this stuff, that's really like the best days is anytime we get that kind of feedback.
So one of the most challenging parts around any sort of online community is just getting
it started.
It's hard to bootstrap a community from scratch because the entire value of a community, what
gets people to join are the other people and at the beginning there are no other people.
How did you get around this problem and start the Dev2 community?
Yeah, absolutely.
So a big part of the success is having been in these kind of spaces, the like two sided
marketplace idea on several previous occasions in my professional career before this and
recognizing how difficult that chicken egg problem is.
And so in recognizing that this was something I kind of wanted to pursue, I really started
with the basics and I took a long time before even attempting to sort of fill that second
side of the equation.
So a community like this needs people to on both sides of the conversation.
So early on, it was all about that one side of the conversation.
It was really much more of a broadcast with the idea that eventually, hopefully it'd be
kind of important enough that more people would want to take part in different ways
and play different roles and stuff like that.
But not trying to be a true kind of network or community off the bat was really like the
only way I thought that this could ever conceivably work.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to just get one side of the equation taken care of and
sort of running on its own and then worry about the other part and not try to go for
the gold from day one.
What was the first part of your community that you worked on?
Yeah, so the whole thing started with, and I mean, it's hard to even say that this what
we are now was necessarily ultimately the goal.
It started out as really an experiment in the software development space.
I knew I wanted to sort of grow something of value to the software community.
It was unclear what that was going to be at the start, but I started by just registering
this Twitter account called The Practical Dev, which really was me and my mindset at
the time really wanting to offer some practical software advice.
I thought there was a lot of people getting on stage and shouting about really impractical
sort of solutions to software.
And at the time, that was the approach I wanted to take.
I wanted to take a more down-to-earth, meaningful approach to talking about code and my day-to-day
life and stuff like that.
And it started off as just me sharing useful links I found on the internet.
And it went through a few phases after that.
Yeah, I mean, The Practical Dev Twitter account, for those who don't follow it, is humongous.
I think today, what are you up to?
Something like 150,000 followers.
So this wasn't just like a tiny effort.
This is something we put a lot of work into.
How do you grow a Twitter account to be that huge?
Yeah, so first of all, I've done this sort of thing in the past.
I'd had a few other sort of online Twitter account turned into businesses.
It's kind of a pattern I'd done a little bit actually in college when Twitter was kind
of new.
And the businesses kind of eventually fell flat.
Not because they didn't really grow, it's because I kind of thought I had to grow faster
than I was.
So I took too many big, made too many big changes and kind of left things spiral.
And then I ultimately sort of didn't do it the right way.
And I had the realization about four years ago that, damn, these things I'd been doing
before, there's no reason this wouldn't still work.
Like nothing in the environment has changed.
The platforms haven't changed.
People's behavior haven't changed.
I just need to not give up on the project.
And I need to take my time.
So I told myself I had 10 years to kind of make this work, and it was just going to be
a side thing.
And maybe in 10 years, if it wasn't working, I'd quit, but I wouldn't do that.
I wouldn't quit at any point in between then and 10 years.
I just kind of made that deal with myself.
And since I was in the software space and really just doing whatever I wanted to be
doing, I knew I wouldn't get bored of it.
I didn't think in 10 years I wouldn't want to be in the code space anymore.
So really taking my time early on was kind of the key.
But then also in taking my time, I really didn't actually put a ton of effort into it
right away.
I really just posted links I found on the web every once in a while, but with enough
of a regularity that it would grow sort of occasionally.
So it was really a whole year of just kind of being a sort of useful Twitter account
before I even really started giving any of my conscious mind.
For about a year, it was just me like once a day scrounging around the internet, Hacker
News, Reddit, stuff like that for what I thought was the most interesting stuff.
And just scheduling a few posts to go out, and that was about it.
And it was very mindless, uninteresting, but kind of useful, and it kind of grew from there.
And eventually...
I was going to say 10 years is a long time to give yourself to work on something.
I mean, that's an incredible amount of patience.
Most people want to be successful right now, today, if not today, next week, at the most,
maybe a year or two from now.
And it strikes me that setting a bar for yourself that you're going to work on something for
10 years is the kind of patience that comes as a result of these past mistakes you'd made
where you'd sort of rush into things and not really giving yourself enough time.
What is the story of one of those past mistakes?
One of those past businesses or endeavors that you went through and some of the lessons
that you learned from that?
Yeah.
So my first like real foray into the magic, I think, of entrepreneurialism that can kind
of grow beyond yourself, I've always been, you know, I'd gotten into some freelance stuff.
I've never been one to really hold down a full-time job, even sort of through high school
and college.
I did some freelance stuff.
But then I got into, you know, kind of like a real company kind of mindset just on my
own in college, just having realized entrepreneurialism is a thing that you can do on the internet
without having to go into the office.
I think the same kind of realization a lot of people listening to this went through.
And so in college, I started a sports nutrition website, not too dissimilar from what Dev2
is now in a way.
It was started as kind of just a platform where people could kind of write and stuff.
And it was just hosted on WordPress.
It was not the most technically amazing thing in the world, but it was just a place that
was growing and interesting.
And I constantly felt, though, that if I didn't do everything with like perfect efficiency,
that Amazon would crush me.
Like a weird thought that I was racing against this giant, which at the time like 2008 wasn't
like Amazon wasn't even nearly as big as it is now.
And yet I had this gigantic concern like that I had to be the ultimate efficient operation.
So I really didn't allow like the growth I was having to be a good answer for me.
So I kept trying to push the envelope, which I think is healthy.
And I think the mindset that a lot of startup founders should have, they shouldn't think
that like they can just be complacent.
But I was way too far on the other side of the spectrum and just did all sorts of wacky
stuff which like ran my expenses up.
Like I turned it from like something that was purely a website to I was then drop shipping
like nutrition supplements and stuff.
And it wasn't even necessarily something I wanted to be doing.
And I was still in college and it was just way too much.
And despite all the success, it was really successful.
It was like paying my rent for a while I just eventually completely burned out and had to
like just stop working on it all together.
And then I took on other interests.
I graduated college, I did some other stuff for a little while.
What lessons did you learn from that that helped you when it came time to grow your
Twitter following for the practical dev?
Yeah, I really looked back and realized that had I just kept things simple, I would have
been gigantic by now.
And it wouldn't have mattered whether Amazon was going to crush certain parts of that industry
and stuff because none of the other competitors were doing anything particularly more interesting.
Had I just kept a growth mindset with a little more patience, everything about that business
would have remained valuable for years and years and years and years and years had I
really stuck with it and cared about it.
And so the lesson there was that like nobody out there is doing anything that much more
interesting than you, even the biggest, most gigantic companies in the world.
So unless you're trying to do something like create a new smartphone or something, you
really you'd be surprised how much value you can bring just by improving sort of the little
things you're trying at.
I think if people even tried some truly daunting things like creating their own search engine,
I think they could as long as they knew that they're not trying to rebuild Google, they're
trying to solve a problem that Google is actually kind of missing out on in a small subset of
the world.
And if you're able to have some kind of realistic expectations about the size and the long term
wins like the really, you have no reason to give up on something, you just need to sort
of have constraints so it doesn't grow to in too many weird directions.
Yeah, I love that.
I think, you know, ultimately, most businesses fail because the founders quit.
And yeah, there's all sorts of external reasons, you know, it's hard to grow, you're running
into issues, you're running low on money, but ultimately, unless you quit, your business
is still going.
And so that persistence is really key.
And it's hard to have that persistence if you have unrealistic expectations, if you're
burning yourself out, if you're trying to move too fast, and so anything that you can
do to help yourself keep going, really pays dividends in the long run.
And I think it shows with your Twitter account as well, when you're getting this community
off the ground, you gave yourself years to work on it.
And for the whole first year, you're just sort of posting links and not taking it super
seriously, how did you transition from that and to growing this thing to the massive size
that it is today?
Yeah, so at a certain point, I made a realization that there was enough total attention there
that I could justify devoting my time to it.
I'm really sort of economically minded in a funny way in that sense, like partitioning
my time more so than really strategizing too much.
So I just thought that there was enough total value being captured with that crowd, that
it was worth the time commitment.
So I started thinking harder about what software developers were really looking for on Twitter,
what answers they were trying to come to, what was really burning at them, because I
knew this was becoming a microphone that I could use.
At this point, it was about 10,000 or 12,000 followers, which seemed like an unbelievable
success at that point, because I'd been sort of delivering value.
I just had a mechanic that was working, but I knew now there was enough there to take
the next step and really start being thoughtful about it, a little bit more additive.
So I started looking at what was working, kind of creating some custom content a little
bit, but also getting into writing jokes and stuff, and that's really when it started really
hockey-sticking in terms of the Twitter account.
I started creating just different kind of jokes, it was all original material, I really
wasn't trying to be another joke thief, which I felt like most any humorous Twitter accounts
really were, they were just reposting stuff from the rest of the web, which really bites
at me.
So I started creating Parity O'Reilly book covers, which were a real smash hit in the
industry, and that's really when it started to become a lot of fun and an incredible amount
of growth.
Yeah, I've seen some of those tweets where you take these O'Reilly programming book covers,
and then you remove the text and you put in something funny, and what's cool about it
is I think most people on Twitter are just posting this sort of self-interested material,
like here's a link to my website, here's an update about something that I'm working on,
and most people don't really care that much about it, but when you're tweeting really
funny jokes that everybody can enjoy and appreciate and retweet, and when you're tweeting really
practical advice that everybody can share with their friends and say this is really
awesome, then I think that unlocks the ability for you actually to grow and build an audience.
Yeah, absolutely.
It was a lot of empathy, like what do people want when they look at their phone, and what
might make people feel more connected with their fellow practitioners of this very complicated
field we're in, and this type of humor really does bring people together, it really makes
them realize that they're not the only one going through some of these hilarious pains
or operating via hacks and just trying their best to do things right, and people really,
really appreciate that, and it was a really big smash hit.
What are some of the things you learned while doing this, besides the fact that these jokes
could be super effective, were there things that you tried to grow your audience that
didn't work perhaps?
Yeah, I feel like I tried all sorts of stuff that didn't work and really tried to pay attention
to what did and didn't, along the way I really had a real strong opinion without any actual
evidence though that if I used Twitter itself and not like TweetDeck or some non-native
platform I'd have a much better feel for what people needed in the moment.
This is a funny little sort of feeling thing, it's hard to justify this, and now I've like
co-workers and I kind of have to like still just like tell them I don't really want to
schedule things I'd rather Tweet it now, it's just like being native to the community, being
one with the platform, understanding people's genuine feelings about things and paying attention
to the vibe in the room, even if the room is the whole world, and the outcomes from
doing that I think really go a long way.
So it was so much more about the input I was receiving than the output, so I spent so much
time just observing what people were caring about, what people were joking about, what
people were concerned about, nervous about, what people thought were the stupidest things
in the world, and I was kind of reflecting a lot of that back into the universe as much
as I could and that felt like the thing that I was giving back was people's own kind of
deepest feelings and concerns about their careers and their craft.
Listening to what you're saying, a lot of your success really just comes down to the
fact that you spent almost all of your time focused on this singular thing.
You weren't building a Twitter community, you know, on the side of some bigger project
that you were working on, that was your project.
I think most people when they go to build an audience, when they go to work on some
sort of marketing channel, it's kind of a thing they can't devote that much time to
and so they don't really take as much time to listen to what the community there really
cares about or really feel like one of the people that they're sort of talking to and
so the result is they don't produce that great of content, their tweets aren't that interesting
and they find it very hard to grow.
At what point in time did you decide to take this Twitter following that you've built and
use it to build a community elsewhere?
Yeah, it was a tough choice because we kind of did become a lot worse at Twitter when
we did that.
I am only one person, I don't try to do everything so I kind of stopped being such a presence
on Twitter.
Like we sort of started doing other things and, you know, to this day we don't really
have as great a presence on Twitter but I thought actually more through feedback I started
realizing more and more people were excited about some of the other things we were doing.
Like I started the website itself kind of as another experiment.
I knew I didn't want to just be a Twitter account, not just a joke account as well,
so I knew I wanted some kind of evolution even if people really, really loved the Twitter
and so that was another just experiment in understanding what people needed, what they
were looking for and also, you know, telling them what I thought they might need and sort
of getting some feedback and stuff like that.
So the website which was named dev.to because that seemed like I really like short domain
names.
I was really trying to center on this dev kind of content and I also thought, you know, the
practical dev, yeah, just it wasn't as slick as I want it to be and dev's kind of weird
but it works and it's been fun.
And so it started out a little bit more like just a sort of publication as I mentioned,
like I didn't even though I had all these Twitter followers at this point, not as many
as we have now but like a ton, you know, enough to really feel like we had momentum.
I still, knowing the universe, I still didn't think people would just start using another
platform as a community.
It's hard enough to get your friends and family to use your new thing, let alone like enough
people to actually build a network and that sort of thing.
So I really took my time with that, tried to understand ways we could deliver value,
tried to just put things in front of people in ways they would really appreciate and not
try to tell them they needed to sign up for anything, not try to tell them they needed
to be part of our network in a different way.
It just like trying to kind of give them more things to chew on, help more people.
And it was actually when I started to realize that some people really love the platform
10 times more than they love the Twitter account.
As much as the Twitter account was popular, the platform really became capable of touching
people in really personal ways, really people felt like when we started letting other people
post, they really felt like we were uplifting them, like we were giving them a voice.
And it was awesome.
Just like hearing that back just a few times and feeling like we were a positive force
in the universe just by putting our values out there, just by standing up for the types
of software developers that do not necessarily always sort of find their in crowd so easily.
And just by doing this stuff, we thought was the best thing for software.
People really, really took to it in a really strong way.
And even the platform itself is not really the abstraction we're looking for.
It's that feeling of inclusiveness and it's just continuing to follow the feedback and
follow the awesomeness without getting too caught up in the numbers and things like that
has consistently been the way to go.
I want to dive into some of these details behind your early community and really get
into your head and what things were like for you back then.
Communities obviously have existed since the dawn of time.
Communities have been online since the beginning of the internet too, but you're not only building
the community, you're building the actual software, the platform that the community
uses to communicate.
And I think that's pretty rare.
Most people just use an existing platform if they're going to build a community.
So they'll use Twitter like you did at first or they'll start a Facebook group or WhatsApp
group or a Slack channel or something.
What did the early Dev2 website look like and what were some of the decisions that you
made and how you could structure your community?
Because the fact that you're building it from scratch by yourself means that you have no
constraints.
It can look like anything you want it to.
Yeah, so early on the reason for building it fairly from scratch and the phrase from
scratch really means a lot of different things in software.
You can pick any sort of layer of abstraction.
But we built from scratch from like a software frameworks that made doing this sort of thing
easy enough.
But I really had the thought that if we want to do this right, we need to get our hands
dirty.
If this is going to be our core competency, like this platform, like whatever it becomes,
we should have our hands in the clay and be able to make it anything we wanted.
That being said, I tried to make it valuable right away and what I had been doing was sharing
links from all over the web.
So I started off by making the platform sort of look a lot like Medium, which was a platform
I noticed programmers were really taking to as the, besides people's individual blogs,
Medium was definitely the winner in terms of shared space and shared platform.
But I thought Medium for all its goodness of bringing a network together and giving
you notifications you might care about and sharing stuff really was not the best reading
experience, especially for software developers.
And I had the thought that they're never going to get better for software developers.
Their core abstraction is publication and software development is the smallest use case
they have.
So for all the software developers publishing on Medium, there's probably a thousand times
more traffic coming to general purpose sort of news and commentary and stuff like that.
So I thought no innovator's dilemma, Medium just cannot become a great software publishing
platform.
And it's still big and great, but I think some of the success in that hypothesis is
really coming to fruition and software developers should have a custom solution, even if that
custom solution isn't all that custom right away.
It's just the idea that it can become a custom solution, come the ideal space for specifically
sharing software development.
And if we were going to do that, the best thing to do is write it all from scratch.
I've always been confused why people think that, quote, reinventing the wheel is kind
of a bad thing in software because basically what you're doing is getting up to speed with
your own code and having a platform to build in any direction you want in the future.
We probably could have gotten V1 up in WordPress in one day, but then we'd be stuck on WordPress's
abstractions for the rest of the universe.
And that is definitely not what we were building.
We were building an abstract concept around solving the needs of software developers.
And you can't do that on someone else's platform unless it's fairly low level.
And also, since it was just me working on it, I didn't really have to convince anyone
of this.
I got to just get my hands dirty, treat it like a project that didn't have a high risk
of failure.
There was really no downside to trying.
And at this point, I had a solid nine years left in my plan.
So if it took nine years to get this up and running, that's fine.
Cool.
So let's talk about some of these specific design choices that you wanted your platform
to look like and the reason why you weren't using an existing platform.
One of them you mentioned is that you wanted the reading and the writing experience to
be specifically tailored to developers and other larger blogging platforms like Medium.
We're never going to do that.
They had to be general purpose.
What are some other goals that you had in mind for the Dev2 platform?
Yeah.
So a big goal, I thought, as a general thing that would ultimately bring value, even if
some of the marketing efforts or something were failures, was delivering a platform that
was extremely high performance.
So being very, very performance conscious, because I observed as a software developer
that the web was extremely slow and bulky, even in its best forms.
Some websites are just brutal and have been bogged down by ads and by heavy JavaScript
frameworks.
And it doesn't take that much to have a fast website.
It's just actually avoiding putting the things that make it slow in there and so right off
the bat, I just thought if we could ship this whole thing in fewer bytes and actually pay
attention to best practices, it felt like the best practices were out there, but nobody
was listening.
Everyone is looking for get rich quick schemes in terms of performance instead of actually
going down to the basics and understanding that the laws of physics have some constraints
like the speed of light and if I'm going to get you a whole experience quickly, I'm going
to have to pay attention to some of those things.
And also the idea of shipping a page where you read words on it really is not so complicated
that you need to bog it down with a lot of heavy programming.
So it was really an effort in minimalism, an effort in defining some really simple constraints
that we still stick to today and just being what we thought the ideal citizen of the web
is.
And some of that is just best practices.
Some of that is hacks because the web itself is not a perfect platform.
And just sort of having that as a true hypothesis, like in terms of user experience, I thought
the idea of what a blog post would look like besides what I thought maybe a specific programming
platform could do better is still pretty simple and can be done in a really performant way.
And that was a huge deal.
And I also thought if any group of people in the whole universe would actually pay attention
to that and actively notice how fast it was, it was the software development community,
it might not be worth it to make those optimizations if your community isn't going to appreciate
or care about it.
But I knew that this group would, and that was a lot of fun doing.
I learned a lot, a lot in making that kind of the core technical objective.
So I assume in the beginning it was you writing all the content for Dev2.
How did you open things up and get it so that other people were helping you contribute to
the articles and the blog posts that you could find on the website?
Yeah, I just kind of gradually started trying to make that happen like one thing at a time.
I tried to kind of make the technical objectives kind of mirror the growth objectives.
So I tried, as soon as I thought there was a few people in my universe I thought might
want to write on it, I didn't even build the features in advance of getting them involved.
I kind of like half built all the features needed.
And as soon as I thought that there was a few people who might want to jump on board,
I just scrambled and put together some of those features, actually looking back a lot
of the earliest accounts have like major bugs on them that just, you know, like if those
people haven't come back and fixed up their accounts, they're kind of broken.
So those first days were a real shit show in that regard, but I didn't want to write
a ton of new stuff before anyone was using it.
So it's a real sort of give and take between anyone who is showing up to write a few things
here and there and then do the things that I needed to do to sort of let them do that
stuff.
So I've even looked back on some of those conversations early on and it was really funny.
I was just like, mostly I was always telling them, if anything doesn't work, just let me
know and I'll fix it.
That was kind of my instruction that I had to give everyone because even it was just
a basic like blog editor, it's not the most complicated thing in the world, but bug free
code in any regard is really hard to do.
And that's why people tell you not to reinvent the wheel because it is hard, but over time
we really ironed a lot of stuff out.
What were these people writing about and where were they coming from?
Are these people that were following you on Twitter and you were saying, hey, come to
our website and write an article or were they friends of yours?
How did you find these people?
Yeah, it was sort of like, I sort of took to, it was mostly internet friends, not a
lot of people in my direct life even knew about the project necessarily.
It was kind of a, I sort of have this sort of thing where I don't really tell anyone
what I'm working on unless I have teammates involved, just because I saw Ted talk about
this like forever ago and it really stuck with me that you can kind of, you should sort
of keep some of your stuff secret so you don't get the satisfaction of telling people before
it's done.
So I didn't really have a lot of personal connections who really were deeply involved
in it, but I had, you know, folks who followed the account, which I felt were a lot closer
to me and would maybe reach out through DMs a little bit more.
And I remember I think the first person in that regard was someone named Jennifer Konikowski,
who I'd never met in real life, but she just DM me like asking me if I could like share
something on the Twitter.
And I thought it was like the perfect opportunity to say, hey, can you just actually repost
this on dev too?
And it was, yeah, and then my next sentence was like, let me know if anything's wrong,
like I'll fix it.
And I think she was the first ever publisher besides me.
And one other person who, so like account kind of got broken and it's kind of hard to
even track down at this point.
But yeah, it just kind of happened.
I just played it as calmly as I could, like trying to pretend it wasn't like the first,
like I don't think she noticed that like no one had ever done this before.
I just kind of made it seem like it was a thing and I knew that if she said, no, I don't
really feel like it, somebody else would come along and be interested.
And I just had this thought that like at this point, I had eight and a half years left.
And if I had a few more of these over time, I thought that the platform would eventually
kind of take off.
How do you get people to write interesting, good content for your community?
Because I think anyone who's running a community is well aware of this quality control problem,
but there might be some people who their interests are sort of aligned with what you want the
community to do, and they're contributing great things.
And other people are just writing whatever they want and the quality bar is not that
high.
How do you make sure in the early days of dev two, that the articles you were posting
were good?
And how has that sort of evolved over time?
Yeah, so early on the quality bar really wasn't that high.
And I didn't even really say yes or no, I just said yes and yes, I just took everything
I could get.
And I didn't share everything on Twitter.
And that was really the like differentiation.
There was kind of a ranking factor from day one, because I had a feeling like nobody was
really coming to the site directly anyway.
So I could just kind of let everything in.
And if there was some stuff that was just kind of crappy writing, as long as it wasn't
violating the code of conduct, it was fine.
If you had the wrong idea about JavaScript, it wasn't that big a deal.
We did select through it ourselves.
But we also kind of just let things through we weren't sure about as long as the author
was making a pretty good attempt, because we just wanted everyone to be having fun.
And what happened is we got surprised consistently about what was interesting to people, what
was really taking off and stuff.
But we didn't just let it sort of grow wild.
We tried to really guide people through just leadership in our own content.
So we'd write in the kind of style we hoped other people would do.
And it really did sort of work that way, like the people really copy other people, even
if they don't realize it, they like, they adopt something that isn't a rule as kind
of the rule, like the guideline.
So you know, I started signing my posts with the phrase happy coding.
And I noticed like, immediately, so many other people started doing that.
And it's really funny, like the people look up to other people, and you kind of think
you have no idea what you're doing, and you're just kind of like, being yourself and doing
your best, but then other people are looking to you for guidance, and just unaware, a sense
of awareness that people were doing that and trying to work to that and have a monkey see
monkey do mindset and knowing that people would really, you know, act the right way
we wanted them to if we just set a good example.
And we really took a pick up from there.
One of the things you've told me before we started this interview was that in the past,
you've done the whole startup treadmill thing where it's an endless effort month after month,
trying to show traction and growth to your investors or to yourself, and I can get exhausting.
How have things been growing dev to you know, how hard has it been to actually increase
the number of people who were members of your community, and what are some of the phases
you've gone through?
Yeah, so, of course, it's been easier with less pressure with that 10 year plan.
But the actual mechanics haven't been that much easier.
And what we did was just take a lot of time early on to get it right.
But then also we became a company like there was a point where I had another full time
startup I was working with and I was I was the technical co founder of a different company
and I was loyal to both things and that's kind of long.
That's like history at this point, but that was a big thing and we wound up actually turning
this into a company by taking in the founder of the other company as the third founder.
So it's myself, Jess Lee and Peter Frank now and that's a whole different story.
But at this point, we decided like Jess and I were burning ourselves out doing this as
a side project and still being devoted to our respective companies.
And so we had to do something different.
We had to kind of go full time or let the project die in a sense, even though it had
a ton of momentum.
We didn't think that would truly happen, but we had a feeling it could happen if we didn't
go full time.
So so we did a major shift in our whole lives.
We got we sort of recapitalize the whole thing.
I had to get tons of my equity just to make sure we were fair to everybody.
So now we're a real startup.
And now what we don't want to do is get back on that damn treadmill.
So I really think so much of that was just remembering that like we had a shared understanding
in all of our lives that we'd done that before.
And it wasn't what we were going to do this time around.
So there's just a few times like here and there where we just kind of realize we're
getting on the treadmill and we have a deep long conversation about how to get off of
it.
And I felt like in the past, that was never a thing.
It was always so clear that we had to just keep pushing on that never ending death march
to try to show numbers, to try to like keep the company alive.
We'd hire more people to speed up the growth, which would just, you know, make it even harder
to reach numbers because we needed to show numbers that could justify all the people
we had.
And it was incredibly brutal.
And we've gotten some of that back in our lives now that we hire a staff and there's
now six total people, including myself and Peter and Jess.
So there's the three of us.
And then we have three employees who earn real salaries and stuff.
And so there's a ton of pressure, but we have consistently stayed ahead of that treadmill
kind of mindset to the best we can and much, much more so than we ever had before in our
professional lives.
So it's just been a, I don't know, a lot of communication myself, Jess and Peter have
a lot of meetings where we really just try to, you know, get back to basics, like focus
on communication, drop projects we don't care about, even though we seem to always pick
up 10 more that we do care about.
You know, there's no silver bullet, but a, you know, a shared principle to understanding
that we don't not want to be doing that again is a big one.
So we have to finance the project in several different ways and we make it all work.
And we're, you know, constantly kind of approaching new, different ways to do it.
And you know, we also give up on things that don't seem to be working at the time.
So we don't get so convinced that like we had this idea, this is how we're going to
make all our money and if it doesn't work, we don't know what we're doing.
So we remain pretty experimental.
We remain pretty opportunistic and we haven't hired someone new in about six months, which
is great.
It's, it's been no new costs and it's, we've really been able to grow a lot in that time
span and stuff.
So we just have a more principled approach at this point.
We're not trying to play the game the way, you know, some tech crunch article tells us
to or trying to play the game our way.
So let's talk about how you've been funding your business and paying to hire people.
What are your revenue streams and how, how are you able to turn this into a real business?
Yeah.
So our only real strong, substantial, gigantic revenue stream right now is a monthly sponsorship
we do with a few companies.
So they put their logos on the sidebar.
We give them a shout out at the beginning of the month and so that that's about it.
And we've been able to make that work because we have what we think of as a ton of unsold
inventory, a lot of brand respect and a lot of attention on the platform.
And we're able to kind of make it work with, with organizations.
And that's been really great.
It's not really what we think our a hundred percent long-term solution is, but it's also
not just some dumb advertising model.
It's a little bit of a sort of respectful in between that really helps a lot of different
parties by sort of letting people know what's available, who our friends are, what's good
out there while also staying true to our ultimate vision, which is I think a little more complicated.
I think it takes a lot longer to make your revenue the way you want to do it when you're
also just growing a really big community that's so abstract and everyone has different values
and we really don't want to do wrong on the software community.
So we've been pretty slow and careful there and just trying to make good friends and grow
our revenues that way.
How did you find your first sponsors?
Because I know it's tough when you've got a website, you're not making any money and
you have to make those first calls or send those emails.
You don't really have a process for doing it.
So what did it look like in the beginning and how has that process changed?
Yeah, I just say we tried to sort of back channel and find the right connections and
stuff.
So it's definitely always just sort of a work in progress.
As I mentioned, it's not like the type of business we care to be the best in the world
that absolutely is in terms of sponsor relationships.
So we haven't scaled out a brilliant process there.
We've just kind of made it work as we go and had a lot of good emails.
And this is really the awesomeness that I think Peter brings to the business.
He really is good at just handling those things and making it work and pulling it together.
And every month we make it work.
And we always kind of have some new things on the go.
We have a few other ways we make money.
We have kind of like a simple kind of like pay what you want membership, just that we
don't even really advertise.
But if people really want to find it, they can.
And ultimately, though, we keep our eyes on the prize in terms of growing the community
and creating actual success stories within the community.
People who really feel like they've found their people, found new jobs even through
connections made on the site and stuff like that, all these really natural things, which
I think will focus more of the business I think around these real key success stories
people are achieving, but not in a way that we want to hurry to do overnight.
We're really trying to find the ways that people really find the most satisfaction and
success on the site.
And the monetization really is a somewhat secondary thing, but we haven't like gone
out and raised a bajillion dollars.
So we have to really be disciplined about that as well.
So a little bit about those kind of things.
So you've got a million and a half different people coming to your website every month.
And I'm pretty humongous, getting there requires sort of a winding path.
It's very rare that you can just find one way to grow your Twitter account or search
traffic.
And that just lasts you forever.
What are some of the different phases you've been through with growing Dev2 and what kinds
of things have you tried that worked and what kinds of things have you tried that didn't
work quite as well?
Yeah, so it really is the kind of thing that we established some good distribution channels
early on with Twitter and elsewhere, even just natural stuff like people posting to
other platforms like Reddit, although Reddit's consistently banned our website for some reason.
So we established that.
We kind of knew this is the same thing other people are doing.
The distribution channels aren't the most complicated part, even though we built up
one good one on Twitter.
But the bottleneck is that people can do anything in the world with their time and why the hell
would they write on your stupid platform?
And so we just sort of examined what writing on the platform really meant, what the kind
of partnership we were making with people was, really being like super duper respectful
of that, being really explicit that we welcome the idea that you can maybe own your own content
and just cross-post it to our site.
So we encourage people who had already kind of just written something on their own website
to just cross-post it.
And early on, we said, yeah, hell, we'll even just do it for you.
Just sign up for your account, and we will make this post happen on our site.
And you'll reach a lot more people.
It'll be fun.
There might be a conversation.
And we didn't try to convince people of the deeper values behind posting.
We really just tried to make it easy for them.
And this idea that cross-posting is a perfectly OK and even encouraged use case or pattern
people are using really, I think, was a big inflection point in terms of our growth where
we didn't think like every single thing needed to be unique to the platform because people
write like, I originally wrote this on my blog.
Here I'm sharing it here.
That's actually great.
That was actually like a really nice way to use the site.
And it just becoming really good at knowing that sort of thing and consistently trying
to offer a product which fit the needs of people at the time and stuff like that.
So there was the phase where we were really early just trying to kind of experiment with
anything.
And then there was sort of a growth phase where we really honed in on consistently being
able to reach out to people and ask them to take part in our little game we were playing
with this community.
And then there was sort of the phase where that was working, and we actually just needed
to keep scaling the platform mechanics so that people were getting enough of the good
stuff and not too much of the bad stuff.
And that the bad stuff wasn't really considered bad unless it was like really bad and harassment
and stuff like that.
So we had a lot of like, we have a lot of acceptance of, you know, people attempting
to write like interesting stuff, but it's just a long term effort and really thinking
through these problems over and over again and never thinking you've solved it once and
for all.
Yeah.
That's all really interesting.
Like, I want to talk about so much of that.
How do you reach out to people and get them to write for your platform?
Are these people who are, you know, really accomplished in the world of programming,
you think they could write a great article?
Or are these people who've already written things you just want them to cross post to
dev too?
Yeah.
So we really focused on just people that already written things that we could vet as interesting
ourselves because it's right there in front of us.
And we just would reach out in a very polite way through public channels.
They'd provided us and said, hey, I think our community would find this really valuable
as well.
Would you be interested in cross posting it?
Let me know.
I can give you a hand.
And that was that.
But we've also completely stopped doing that altogether.
Like we did that for until it became less necessary and now we have such a great thriving
community that every day it's just a matter of moderation and growth and continuing to
improve the features and stuff like that because, you know, our homepage, we have the very top
posts are the very top post is basically determined by us, but the rest is all an algorithm.
And that's just kind of how we roll.
And we have developed a platform that really fits our needs.
And that goes back to doing it from scratch.
Like we built all our own anti harassment sort of software and because that was like
our core competency.
We wanted people to have a decent time.
And we consistently have to keep working on that.
But we took that as our as something we cared about from day one instead of realizing like
two years later that, oh, my God, we've created a cesspool like I think a lot of other platforms
do.
We really focused really hard on on, you know, people being treated well and therefore wanting
to hang out and talk about code.
So the effort continues.
That actually is becoming more and more important now that we doesn't we have a steady flow
of content.
And it's really so much about that kind of mechanic.
It's really about being true to our values and wearing them on our sleeves and, you know,
not letting people be total assholes to one another, but also letting them be creative
and funny and silly and stuff like that.
So it's it's all just it's it's all just a matter of the day to day like really caring
about this stuff.
What are some things that you believe to be true during the course of running dev two
but that you ended up being wrong about?
Early on, I was really fairly obsessed with grammar.
And I mean, not for like overly obsessive, but I really thought it was really important
to have really strong editing for every post.
And ultimately, that's important enough, like you want to kind of make sure people are not
totally disregarding their writing quality, but largely people don't seem to care much
about that.
So that was kind of a realization.
Early on, I remember like going through this with people and that just I stopped in that
because it was just so much time to do and then realize like, at no point was it ever
a big problem.
So there was that as just kind of a little thing.
But it was all about sort of time commitments as I was working on my own.
I had a lot of things that I'm glad I never did.
And I'm glad I really stuck to certain constraints.
For a while, I thought the economics would be so good that I could, you know, maybe pay
for certain growth like areas.
I never actually did any of that and I'm glad I didn't because I think forcing myself to
do it all very naturally would be really, really turned out way better.
Even if some of the economics do work out like that, forcing yourself through the need
to automate things and grow like as a one single person working on something and then
just two people working on something and things like that.
Those constraints were phenomenally important.
So like we have a lot of great automation in the back end.
And I think that's because we never thought we could just hire two people to do this job.
Give me an example of some of those automated things you've got going on.
At this point, it seems like it's fairly typical stuff.
I'd say it's more early on, I would just write a lot of scripts for myself to gather sort
of information I needed and stuff like that.
So like when I was just tweeting out articles early on in the days, I could have kind of
done some of that manually, but I sort of just made my own link gathering script that
I could then parse through just on my computer.
And it really was fairly simple and straightforward.
And I didn't need to do it because I could have just opened up a bunch of tabs.
But that spending an hour in that script made the whole thing.
I don't know if I would have kept up the project if I didn't have a document sitting waiting
for me when I needed it and had to run through all these different platforms looking every
time myself, which I think people are a little slow to do sometimes.
Or obviously, if they don't have the software skills, they aren't really capable of doing.
But little things like that have been really big.
And then otherwise, recently, we always put a lot of care into support, into just sort
of answering people's questions, fixing their account issues when things break and stuff
like that.
And we have really been putting a lot of effort into providing great support, but limiting
the number of hours we have to put into it.
So just getting to bugs that cause more support issues as a really important objective, getting
to sort of creating features that even create fewer support issues.
Just like even if we think a feature is the best in the world, if it causes way too many
incoming support issues, we're going to consider scrapping it.
And we also have our own custom support backend instead of like a Zendesk because it's kind
of maybe silly and I'm not sure it's the right idea, but we are able to kind of see the whole
context right within our app.
And if we ever need to change something to make it one fewer click or just slightly more
efficient because we're doing the same thing over and over again, we're not beholden to
other people's interfaces and ways of doing things because we could actually do this whole
chunk of type of support tickets as like single buttons instead of like whole workflows and
stuff like that.
So we just pay a lot of attention to that.
And as a company, we know like if we do those things well, we are going to be successful.
And I mentioned earlier that I kind of can sometimes obsess over those things and I don't
think I'm nearly like that as much as I used to be, but it still kind of comes through.
So it's a little bit of just the right amount.
You mentioned earlier when we were talking that you've had this sort of explosion of
growth since the end of the spring.
What do you think went into that?
Why did that happen?
And have there been other times in the past where growth has been maybe stalled and you
had to figure out a way out of it?
Yeah, growth has always been consistent but like difficult.
Never did we seem like we were really flowing like we are now and we are incredibly paranoid
that this is just a temporary thing and we always need to keep kind of working on it.
But these days, a few things have happened.
It's just like the consistent work we've put in in terms of the ideas behind network-driven
things like where every new person enhances the value for everyone else, they're supposed
to kind of pick up speed and momentum and get better and better and better and we don't
think it's anything new.
It's a lot of culmination of a lot of great effort in the past but we've also had just
a lot of really good things that have happened in terms of just encouragement from big people
in the community, like just opportunities have come up and we've really stuck to just
working hard.
But we also, I mean the reason things in August are doing so well is just last week we went
open source with the whole code base which –
Yeah, I saw that.
That was crazy.
Yeah, and that's another effort in sort of becoming a more efficient organization.
Things run much more smoothly when all the code is out there and people have eyes to
find help you fix bugs and stuff.
We're not out there looking for everyone to give us free work and stuff but a lot of
people really genuinely want to contribute as just a side project, as just something
they're interested in for their own learnings and otherwise just kind of fix issues they
run into.
But also like open source is like the greatest thing in the world and in our sort of tiny
little software universe we're kind of talking about but the goodwill that came from that
is just like we're sharing our code with the whole community, we're really showing
some of that transparency, we've really been going for from day one in terms of just putting
our principles out on our sleeves and like really like showing our values and stuff.
And this was just a huge, huge amount of momentum.
So like if we're growing 15 to 20 percent every month, that's a harder number to hit
every month.
So like this month we have like 250,000 new people who didn't visit last month, like that's
a lot of people.
And it's just been, yeah, like pretty great and we think the things we're doing with open
source are some of the, it's new and we're not like doing it all right now yet but I
think we've got some of the more interesting like innovative ideas that are in open source
just in terms of the long term sort of feedback cycles you can create in terms of people contributing
back to projects they actually use and stuff like that.
So we're, we really think, like I'm frankly blown away by the whole thing, like we were
number one on GitHub for the whole week and I don't know how much that number matters
like stars on GitHub and stuff but like if you're going to measure anything like being
number one is the best place to be like on the whole website, it's a pretty massive platform.
So we are like blown away by some of the goodwill and success and some of the messages we get
about like how this platform is really just changing people's lives and then, you know,
some people it's just kind of the lame, this lame software website that doesn't really
have content they love or stuff like that, you know, like nobody, it doesn't touch everyone
the same way but the growth has just been crazy and it's just been a culmination of
a lot of hard work plus like a really a few great opportunistic ideas that my team has
like done such a great job of buying into and really working towards.
We really had to basically feature freeze for a while to get this open source thing
happening just to make sure we were, you know, crossing all our T's and dialing all our I's
in terms of security measures and stuff like that and it took a lot of buy-in from the
whole team to think that was a good idea and I'm just super proud of everybody who is working
on this project both within our company and the whole community, it's been fairly magical.
What does the future look like for Dev2 and where do you go from here?
Yeah, so we're going to continue to stress like crazy that we are really being a community
in every sense of the word, really scaling these things right, not taking for granted
that at this scale something works and at 10 times the scale it won't work, like we
really are really trying to stay ahead of things and do things better than some of these
other environments which just become toxic or unhelpful and we really think that's the
way to provide the most valuable environment for programmers of all experience levels,
all backgrounds.
The best environment is one with professional attitudes and stuff like that and we are leaning
like crazy into these ideas while also we plan on evolving our business strategy.
I think we want to become less solely beholden to the sponsorship relationships which I think
we've kept really healthy but we just don't want this to be like our true scalable business
and so we've got some ideas, we may be raising some money at some point just to make this
happen, not like some massive series A or anything, just a little bit of wiggle room
to maybe hire one or two more people and I'm really glad we put that off because we are
in a great position to just do everything in a really healthy way and just find some
like true partners along those lines.
The future I think is pretty bright but it's a lot more of the same and a lot more of just
being 10 times better at the things we already are kind of good at as opposed to trying to
capture like 10 more things to be good at.
We're going to try to just be better at the things we're already like trying to be good
at.
And one thing I'm curious about is what it actually looks like to be working on a site
like this, how much of your time and how much of the people that you're working with of
their time do you spend just sort of maintaining the status quo, moderating posts, keeping
the site running and how much, you know, what percentage of your time do you spend on sort
of growth tasks and doing things that push the site forward and take you to the next
level?
Yeah, I would say we don't focus on growth very much, especially these days.
So I'm constantly kind of having to like, you know, recreate some like pretty weird
hypotheses with my co-founders and stuff like that and they're kind of like bringing the
same to me about just like what is important for us and we really don't feel like this
whole thing is going to grow because we have like, you know, the perfect kind of like call
to action to sign up or anything like that, like or any sort of really great marketing
pushes or anything that would sort of go into maybe some growth hack mechanics.
We really focus on, you know, success of people sort of feeling like they belong and feeling
like they've contributed and the community has responded grace graciously.
So when we think about growth, it's like how many people who are already on the platform
and maybe just kind of hanging out at this point, can we turn into like just lifetime
fans and to do so for all the right reasons.
So not tricking them into becoming part of some loyalty program or anything, but just
making them feel so welcome by the broader programming community that they wouldn't want
to sort of go anywhere else and that their needs are being taken care of, but we also
aren't saying you can't spend other time elsewhere.
So just being like welcoming, trying not to be too walled gardening, trying to play well
with the other platforms that we work with in a sense, like people sharing things on
Twitter, like so Twitter is, you know, kind of red a facto partner in a sense, like we're
on GitHub as a code community.
So just trying not to be too much of like everything for everyone, but everyone within
our community in terms of like, you know, sharing those ideas, getting feedback, like
just expressing sort of thanks for the community for any way, like if we can create more success
stories like that, that's kind of how we win.
And, and that's just little sort of like mechanical stuff, little words here and there.
Like we try to softly give people guidance in terms of being better community members
and stuff like that.
And we really empower like the top 5% of contributors to really feed the cycle of just happy, healthy
software development ecosystems and, and that's kind of where any future growth will come
from.
So we don't really think growth all that much in the past, maybe we have a little bit, but
these days, it's all just about the like fundamental principles of the goodness we're bringing
to the world, which is really a great, exciting thing to be having meetings about.
Yeah, I love that I don't have to like push back against ideas, because I'm the only one
holding some of these values, like I really like the whole team, and the whole greater
community is, is sharing and holding these values with us.
So like, we know we can't do the wrong thing, because the community is has this shared understanding
that we're going to be doing some of the right things.
And, and we also have a shared understanding that we're a business, we have a shared understanding
that whatever choices we make, we're going to do with it for the good of the whole community
and the growth of this platform and how much you know, we the founders really care about
it.
And so that's really the day to day, it's kind of like just a lot of little things that
and none of it really is super growth focused, except for new features, which can, you know,
make people's experience better and, and frankly, like I couldn't imagine a better, healthier
way to grow something.
I'm really just curious about like the amount of effort it takes to keep dev running.
If you aren't going to do any sort of major new initiatives, if you aren't going to open
source anything, if we're going to add new features or fix any bugs, if you just wanted
the site to keep going as it is without any changes, how much time would that take?
How much manpower that require?
Yeah, that's interesting.
I feel like I can do it myself, like honestly, like it's a pretty scalable thing.
We have a pretty small team and I think if unless unless if this universe was such that
I couldn't build support automation, then or fix bugs that cause support issues, then
it would take more people.
But the overall operation of the whole thing at this stage is pretty, pretty low maintenance
besides trying to make it better and stuff and knowing that we won't reach, we don't
have the features for bigger scale and new things we want to do.
But yeah, in the theoretical universe where it was just growing on its own with no new
features and no major initiatives or anything.
Yeah, I think I could pretty safely do it myself, which is pretty interesting to think
about.
Yeah, that's really awesome.
You mentioned earlier that you want people who come to dev to have a great experience
and you want as many of them as possible to have a great experience.
This is one of the things that's tricky with the online community because your homepage
can only show so many articles.
Every page on your site can only really show so much content.
How do you strike a balance between getting more people to contribute more to dev2 and
also ensuring that people actually have the things that they write read by other people
who come to the site?
Yeah, so we don't.
To some extent, we have this, but much less so than other sites.
We don't have a strongly, super heavily optimized winner-loser dynamic in terms of the posts.
I think we try to mix things up, show posts, give every post a little bit of a chance to
breathe and to live and to stick around on the new post page for a little while.
I think most kind of efforts get their fun in the sun and we don't create these threads
with like a bajillion comments.
We really kind of more keep it like more threads with five or ten comments.
We even have like certain types of tags, actually like the rules are kind of built so that like
actually once a few people have talked about this, it kind of sinks.
Those are just kind of the technical details of sort of how the site runs and I'm surprised.
I think a lot of sites just take for granted the idea that like everything should be sort
of winner-take-all and stuff like that.
I really feel like early on and we don't get everything perfect, but it was a much more
principled approach like what's a natural way for people to try to kind of get the help
they need, like have the conversations they want to be having.
Not every single element needs to like go big, like the best things don't need to be
seen by bajillion people and the worst things don't need to be never seen by anyone.
So really striking, I think just a little better balance than some other platforms.
And just having the confidence to do that because it's easy to say like, oh, we have
to like the best things have to be the best and stuff, but it's such a feedback cycle.
Like the stuff that rises to the top of some other platforms is sort of random.
It's kind of like once it got steam, it kept going, but it doesn't mean that thing that
got 10 times less upvotes or whatever was 10 times worse.
It just like didn't totally catch on.
So we just tried to build an ecosystem that reflects the like natural nuance of the real
world and sort of like has some variance built in where more people can achieve more success.
We also really just encourage people to express thanks when they've written a post than when
they read a post.
So like, if only 10 people read my post, but one person actually literally thanks me, I'm
like pretty happy, I don't need 10,000 people to read it necessarily.
But if 100 people read it and two or three like have something kind of positive to say
or anything like that, it's a pretty great outcome.
And I don't think our community is all optimizing for the most possible views on anything.
So we really just try to help people kind of achieve small wins and feel welcome and
feel like they got their stuff out there and they had a good time writing it and stuff
like that.
There are tons of other online communities and websites where developers and other types
of people congregate.
What are some things that you've learned from other people?
What are some ways that other communities have inspired you?
And on the flip side, what are some things that you guys are doing that you think other
communities are doing wrong?
You mentioned not sort of being obsessed with these network effects and promoting the most
popular posts.
And then other things you guys do differently than the communities you see online?
Yeah, so firstly, I'll sort of talk about the things we definitely copy.
I think we really try to pay attention to what works with some other people, also not
try to reinvent the wheel in terms of the way the interface looks.
I think if you go to our site and then you go to a site like Twitter or Facebook or Medium
or Product Hunt or your site, there's a lot of shared dynamics there.
So we try to copy good applications and stuff like that.
And then we also try to pay attention to little things other people are doing so well that
we're actually jealous of them and stuff like that and not try to play or hate too much
on the people doing it really well and just try to learn from everybody.
I think the things we do differently, I think we don't quite take for granted some concepts
that have come to be on the internet.
I really think we take our time on the lower level mechanics much more than I see elsewhere
or just kind of have a feeling other people are doing where a lot of stuff is really top
down from the interface.
And I think our ideas about the platform haven't changed a lot, even if the interface changes
from time to time.
And sometimes we'll have a conversation where we might change something in the interface,
but the conversation we're really having is like, what's the purpose of this?
And this is just kind of a feeling I have that maybe we're taking a different approach
than other people.
It's hard to say, I know that we're doing it differently.
I really think we've kind of paid attention to the platform mechanics and the purpose
of different parts of the site and wanting to do features that will have lasting value
and good reuse and stuff.
And I think some other platforms do this really well, but some definitely really don't.
What are some examples?
Well, I think Facebook was pretty principled and had good ideas early on, but have just
as a platform completely gone off the rails in terms of features and stuff.
It's really hard to like, I mean, and just as a company and as a principle, zero respect
for the users at every stage.
And I'm just even saying, I don't really love Facebook's overall ethos as a company, but
even just from a product management perspective, I just feel like they've totally gone off
the rails.
But also, they're so big.
I can't say it's easy.
I think we have a hard time just serving 100,000 people.
They're so much bigger and so there's a lot of respect there, but we totally use a lot
of that stuff as a cautionary tale and without delusions of grandeur, but we're definitely
trying to just do things a little better than we sort of see elsewhere.
And a consistent eye towards performance, just like we are built by software developers.
We're not like kind of software developers taking orders.
So a continued principled approach to being good about that, because over time we've had
to ship more bytes because we have more features and more complicated features and we have
web sockets and things that can kind of make a page heavier, but we still kind of stick
to a pretty reasonable budget and consistently grow within our means.
And I open up the dev tools on some of these platforms and it is just crazy how much is
going on just to serve essentially the same type of page we're serving.
There's no technical reason they need to be such resource hogs, but it's really tough
when you have a lot of different teams, like an engineering organization of 500 people.
We have an engineering organization of four engineers in our company, which I think seems
pretty big.
But we also, two, like myself and Jess, some weeks we don't even get to code.
So sometimes we only have two engineers and then Andy actually does all the support stuff,
not all of it, but he leads that all up.
So on some days we only have one engineer, I think.
We really, we can't kind of get, it's impossible for us to not be on the same page.
And so we haven't gotten into that trap of just growing and adding all sorts of random
crappy features and all sorts of different things that don't go together.
We have one solid unified code base.
We don't have microservices, we don't, we kind of have a minimal approach to things
even if we're kind of, if no software development is truly uncomplicated, but we really sort
of try as hard as we can to stay pretty minimal in that sense.
Part of how you learn to build your company is through experience, but you can also learn
by taking other people's advice and learning from their experiences.
What are some things that you've learned from others, and also what's your advice for other
people who might just be started getting started with their own companies?
Yeah, I'm certainly a student of like the sort of advice channels out there.
You know, I think like Paul Graham's essays are really, really wonderful, even though
I like actively disagree with a ton of that stuff.
I think it's all really good, good reading material.
I remember one sort of random interview I saw, I wish I could track it down, but it
was like back when I was in college, and this has stuck with me forever, and I think it's
like really like totally something I've continued to do, is that you don't need to, the first
version of something doesn't need to be all that innovative.
You can actually just copy somebody else as your first version with the idea that once
you kind of like go through the practice of kind of cloning their thing or kind of just
catching up with them, you therefore have the context to kind of grow to something else.
And I think a lot of people, for one thing, they expect that they should be innovative
or something, or they, I don't know, they have an assumption that if they're too generic
at the start, they like can't grow to be something more special.
And as specific advice, that's really stuck with me and is exactly what we did with this
project.
And the first version of Dev2 could not have been more uninteresting, like there was zero
innovation going on besides like, you know, maybe some approaches to like performance,
but like it was such a great platform on which to build, like just conquering some of these
problems in the most simple way and then growing from there.
And the problem is you can't possibly like pitch someone on your random future idea.
Like it's literally like no one would ever believe you if you came up with like a basic
clone of Craigslist, but said, Oh no, this is actually the future of the web because
I just kind of started here and I'm actually gonna like, I'm gonna bring people on who
are comfortable with the Craigslist interface, but I'm actually gonna evolve it to be like,
you know, a much more sort of like mobile first kind of like, you know, new experience
over time, but my strategy is that people will be very like, comfortable interfacing
with the Craigslist style thing because they've been doing that for 20 years.
And that's really hard to sell people because if you pitch them on the thing you built and
it looks like Craigslist, they're gonna laugh you out of the room.
But I personally think that's like a really great approach and I think there's so much
time wasted on like, just, I don't know, like V zero things that are like a little too innovative
and not serving like the basic needs and like just the boring kind of things that can work
early on.
And I don't know, I don't know if people have the confidence to come out with something
boring and like, and with their own confidence that it will someday be innovative.
Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense because ultimately a lot of startups are winding path.
It's like a staircase or a stair-step approach where what you ultimately want to build doesn't
necessarily look like what you first start building.
And it's hard for people to, I think, really internalize that and so they start trying
to build their ultimate angle in the beginning and that causes all sorts of problems.
So I totally agree.
Anyway, Ben, it's been great having you on the podcast.
Thanks so much for joining and sharing your stories and your learnings and your experiences.
Can you tell listeners where else they can go to find out more about Dev2 and about what
you're working on personally?
Yeah, so my personal website is basically Dev2 slash Ben at this point.
Everything I do in Dev2 land can kind of be found there.
My Twitter account is Ben D Halpern and that's where you'll find a lot of, you know, just
sort of like me hanging out with the rest of the developer community and stuff like
that.
There's a lot of just, you know, meta conversations about Dev2 because that's sort of all I care
about these days and no, that's about it.
Although I think I want to be spending a little more time on indie hackers just hanging out.
I have an account and I've played around a little bit, but maybe I'll hang out there
a little bit more because I think I really would like to.
I just kind of haven't really done it enough.
Even vice versa, I should hang out a little bit more on Dev.
Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, thanks so much for coming on the show, Ben.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
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