Not about tomatoes

I spent the last couple weeks near Sacramento—or as we called it when I was growing up, Sack o’ Tomato.

This really isn’t about tomatoes, but humor me for a moment.

In Sacramento, they’re really serious about their tomatoes. The guy across the street from where we stayed is a biologist who has spent his entire career studying tomatoes.

You don’t need to have a PhD in tomato anatomy to grow them. You also can’t just toss seeds at the ground like you’re planting a lawn.

Most tomatoes start inside in small pots with a controlled environment. Then, only after the plants have grown big enough to survive, you choose the right timing, soil, and location for a proper planting.

In the same way you can’t scatter a field with tomato seeds, you can’t simply “build a developer community.”

See! I told you this isn’t about tomatoes!

The garden metaphor may be over-used, but for good reason. Too often “community builders” are focused on the harvest and not enough on the growing.

It’s easy to look at successful companies with vibrant communities and skip ahead. You want a large group of developers to celebrate your product. By looking at where these communities end up, you miss the up-front efforts that got them there. You aren’t seeing how they nurtured the seedlings of the community or carefully selected its location.

Before you can have a community around your product, you need to attract an initial group of developers. Help the early start of a community understand how your product solves their problems.

Remember the core tenet of Developer Marketing Does Not Exist is to flip the perspective: don’t promote your product, so also don’t start with community dedicated to your product.

Actually, tomatoes provide some great guidance here, too. Did you know tomatoes and basil go well together? That’s true not just in recipes, but in the soil. Apparently it keeps pests away and encourages more tomatoes to grow.

When it comes to developer communities, find the basil for your tomato. Rather than start a community from scratch, introduce your product to an existing, complementary community that can help it thrive.

To discuss how EveryDeveloper can help, see how to work with us.

Alternatively, you can just throw tomatoes at us. 🍅