Become a community detective 🕵️‍♂️

Very few actors are as versatile as Jonathan Groff. From voicing Kristoff (and, of course, Sven!) in Frozen to King George in Hamilton, Groff’s IMDb page lists a wide variety of projects.

But my favorite Groff character might be Holden Ford in the Netflix psychological crime series, Mindhunter—maybe because I watched it on my own time instead of on loop with my kids.

It tells the story of two FBI agents in the late 1970s as they interview serial criminals to get in their minds and understand their psychology.

Their theory? Look at criminals’ past actions to predict the future actions of others. And for the most part, this turned out to be true.

Unsurprisingly, I see a similarity in how we reach developers and get inside their heads.

I wrote about how we explored the Zapier Platform audience for the inaugural issue of Gravity, a new magazine about community engagement.

If you’re starting from zero, a few interviews to lay the groundwork can be helpful. After all, conversations are the number one go-to strategy for community building. Indeed, Mindhunter uses 1:1 interviews with serial criminals to understand past actions.

Of course, the developers you want to reach are not criminals—but many of their actions are stored in your analytics tools.

When I go mindhunting, which is usually related to our work helping developer marketing teams attract developers with our D.E.V. Content Framework, I first look to existing systems for untapped developer data, like:

• Google Analytics or other web analysis tools
• GitHub repositories
• Package managers and SDKs

These tools, and many more, already hold the answers to who your developers are and, most importantly, what they—and future devs—want.

You can continue to make assumptions, and by all means, listen to what developers tell you. But validate both of these by the loudest message they can send: their actions. Check out Mindhunting in your member analytics for more details.

And if you need a Bill Tench co-detective to your Holden Ford, we’re ready to help you investigate.