I have been the first Marketing VP at 3 dev-facing unicorns: Neo4j, Sourcegraph, and JFrog. I write about creating developer categories for startup founders.

What exactly is a dev community?

After your users have been activated, they are reaping value from your product. Success! And you're done, right? Not at all. So many early-stage startups neglect the next stage, which is essential.

Devs hate to buy, but they love to join.

They want to join a community of their peers who are all working on the same problems. But if you are on your own, there's no one to join. This is where you, the vendor, step in. You can provide a community of peers for your dev users to join.

A community is not an audience, and it is not a mob.

What is a community? Is it a slack channel, a discord, or even a message board? No. A community is a group of people with a shared goal and a communication mechanism. In the beginning, you need to recruit the first few members, and set the agenda for communication. It could be a meetup, a zoom, or online messages, but more important is a set of topics.

You are the host, not the star.

As a vendor, you are not your users' preferred speaker. You're not even second--you're third. The second place goes to the users' peers. They want to find out how their peers solved the core problem they have all gathered to address. But the top preferred speaker is -- themselves. They want to address their peers. But they require you to give them the platform and assemble the audience.

Word of mouth starts here.

And when your users start communicating with each other--that is success. This is the essential "content marketing" that every startup is driving for. Users tell users about the problems they have solved and the value they have achieved.

For best practice examples, check out the user videos on JFrog's home page.