Community-led growth (CLG) has emerged as a popular way to drive business as companies strive to develop a strong user ecosystem that organically attracts new customers, serves as a support network for millions, and completely destroys the company’s bottom line. His own will.
Businesses like Stripe, Slack, Canva, Notion, and Faima have grown exponentially on the backs of their local communities, which in turn has led to new technologies designed to help such businesses leverage their fans, reach their biggest fans, and keep that CLG flywheel spinning. Investors have taken notice, too: Last year alone, we saw companies like Comsor raise $50 million in Series Bs. Common room safe $52 million; Thread in a $3.1 million seed round; And, recently, Talkbase raised $2 million to power user-driven growth for any company.
Now, another new company has entered the fray of community-driven development with a slightly different approach to existing players, focusing on developer communities and the original source.
Founded in Berlin in 2021, Crowd.dev aggregates data from countless developer communities, including GitHub, Discord, Slack, Twitter, DEV, and Hacker News, and provides analytics and workflow automation on this aggregated data.
For example, a developer tool company may want to build relationships with them and their employers to better understand their users and improve their product and find better product-market fit. This could include collecting and viewing all direct and indirect feedback in a single interface, or identifying community conversations that are ripe for engagement by relying on one of Crowd.dev’s premium tools, such as Eagle Eye’s Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Crowd.dev: Eagle Eye App nomage Credit: Crowd.dev
To help take things to the next level, Crowd.dev has raised €2.2 million ($2.2 million) in a pre-seed round of funding led by Seedcamp and Lightbird, along with Possible Ventures, Angel Invest and some angel participation. Supporters. On top of that, the German startup has launched a major platform, a move to differentiate itself in an increasingly crowded space.
But first, it is worth considering why Developer-focused companies may need a dedicated platform to manage their community-driven development efforts, with authorities already available to any user community – including developers.
constants
Crowd.dev CEO and founder Jonathan Reimer says the word “community” has a broad meaning and can refer to anything from social media influencers to online learning groups. Ultimately, a “one-size-fits-all” approach won’t work – a company focused on attracting developers, or a company that wants to attract creators or crypto fans, probably needs different tools.
“There’s been enthusiasm around community, but there’s also disillusionment with new tools designed to make community building easier,” Reimer told TechCrunch. “I tried [existing] I was never satisfied with tools from previous jobs and they didn’t match my use-cases. Similar to CRMs (customer relationship management software), we believe it will have a vertical position in the community software space. We are the first in the developer space.
This “verticalization” is important in building a platform that people actually want to use. In the case of Crowd.dev, it aims to create a product that suggests actions that the user can take based on information from the developer community, in this way specialization allows him to better adjust the product and “build a more reliable model”, as Reimer puts it, for example by getting feedback or evaluating sentiment.
“Achieving this for all kinds of communities at the same time is going to be incredibly difficult,” Rimmer said. “Developer communities have amazing similarities, and especially for open source communities, we need access to a lot of historical training data.”
Crowd.dev analysis nomage Credit: Crowd.dev
Because of open source
Open source communities have been playing a fundamental role in driving software adoption, which is why more and more companies are choosing to offer their products under an open source license. If developers can tinker with the software less, contribute some code, and even add new features, they’re more willing to use the software in their workplace — and therefore more willing to convince their employers. It’s worth paying for premium features on an open source product. And this is the main driving force behind Crowd.dev’s focus on open source development communities, and the reasons for launching its own platform.
“We believe that an important tool for developer-oriented, open source companies — like community management — should be open source itself,” Reimer said.
Moving to an open source platform can have other benefits as well. For example, enterprises that want more transparency and control over their data can host Crowd.dev on their own infrastructure and then pay Crowd.dev to unlock access to unlimited users and integrations. Or companies can choose to pay for the hosted incarnation of Crowd.dev, which includes a basic free tier in addition to more advanced enterprise plans.
In its short lifespan so far, Crowd.dev has featured an impressive roster of clients such as the Linux Foundation and Microsoft. This company has been a pioneer for many years in embracing open source, following its vision for community-driven software over the past eight years.
Reimer said Microsoft will use Crowd.dev to run Flatcar Linux, a Linux distribution for containerized workloads that will be launched in 2021 after acquiring developer Kinvolk.
“They use Crowd.dev primarily to analyze community members’ engagement, identify relevant astrologers on GitHub, and generate reports,” Reimer said.
In reality, users like Microsoft and big tech won’t be typical users, as most of Crowd.dev’s target customers will be small companies looking for growth. But still, Crowd.dev has had “several hundred organizations” join the company’s beta product since March of this year, an indication of the mindshare Crowd.dev has been able to secure.
“Eighty percent of our users are companies that see the community as their critical growth channel between seed and Series B,” Reimer said.
With €2.2 million in the bank, the company says it plans to add more applications and data integrations before making it generally available to the public.
