How to Launch a Dev-First Startup: Community & Leadership

Welcome to the second article in our definitive series on how to launch a developer-first startup, featuring advice from veteran founders. Get more time-tested insights from some of the most experienced founders in software here:

• How to Launch a Dev-First Startup: First Principles
• How to Launch a Dev-First Startup: Day-to-Day Tactics
• Technical & Cultural Learnings from 10 Years of Computing

Creating Software-Defined Movements, Learning Strategic Skills

In this article, we compile decades of experience from seasoned founders and technology leaders on what it takes to build a community-driven movement around your startup, as well as the important strategic skills that new founders need beyond writing code.

How to Build a Movement in Software

Some of the biggest success stories in software come from startups that didn’t just release a product–they created movements. They conscripted an army of developers who not only bought the software–they used the hashtags, put the stickers on their laptops, and even wore the T-shirts. In public! Some of them even held an entire conference on software-defined movements. But where did they start? In this article, we’ll cover:

1. Understanding Differences Between Movement, Company, Product, Problem
2. Cultivating the Right Conditions While Holding a Strong Position
3. Putting in the Work and “Beating the Drum”
4. How Successful Movements Start Small
5. Why Building a Successful Movement Means Giving the Reins to the Community

1. Separate Movement Versus Company Versus Problem

Tailscale cofounder David Crawshaw points out that although successful developer-first products generate value–often outsize value–for end users, focusing on solving that key problem is something to consider separately from creating a grassroots movement. “If you're really interested in building a movement, then you have to accept that you're going to go out and attempt to create a lot of value that you're not going to capture. That's kind of what a movement is–it’s about getting a lot of people involved.”

“So there's a fundamental tension in trying to both start a startup and create a software-defined movement. They're often going to be at odds. And some movements are fundamentally going to undermine companies, and you probably don't want to start one of those if you're starting a company. And so, you're walking a tightrope–you're threading a needle. So I think if you want to start a movement, you should think about that problem independently of your business and try and understand that problem, and then you should try and understand your business as a separate problem, and then you should try and understand how to fit the two together.”

You can't choose to start a movement. But you can make it more likely by creating the right starting conditions.” -James Lindenbaum, Cofounder/Heroku, Founding Partner, Heavybit

2. Put in the Work to Build Community While Holding a Strong Position

Heavybit founding partner and Heroku cofounder James Lindenbaum suggests that not every startup will create a full-blown movement, or has to. While it’s possible and very much worth the effort to cultivate the conditions that grow a thriving community (which is essential for a successful developer-first startup), real movements happen when the stars align. “You can't necessarily choose to start a company. The most successful companies are a thing that happens to you, almost against your will. Similarly, I believe you can't choose to start a movement. But you can make it more likely by creating the right starting conditions. The same things that make for a good movement, culturally also make for a good product.”

Lindenbaum notes that many of the top startups have been built on a foundation of strong conviction. “Successful startups tend to have a very strong point of view on a particular domain. ‘This is the way. These things aren't being done the right way.’” However, successful startups aren’t just obstinate–they can clearly outline the problem they seek to solve, clearly state why their solution is the right one, and can empower their community to do the same. “That point of view has to be strong. It has to be well articulated. And you also have to turn out to be right.”

Your next conference speech is another beat of the drum, explains LaunchDarkly’s Edith Harbaugh. (Image courtesy CollisionConf)

3. Your Mission Will Be to Beat the Drum Every Day, Anywhere You Can

LaunchDarkly cofounder Edith Harbaugh is blunt about starting a software-defined movement. “It's far harder than you might think. The joke I usually make is that the first 10 customers are the absolute hardest–and the next 100 after that are also hard.” Harbaugh also emphasizes the importance of repetition in getting the word out on your startup. “You have to constantly, constantly beat the drum. It's not just one blog post that ‘goes viral,’ or one really good Hacker News post. It’s not like that at all. You have to write not just one blog, but probably tens, or hundreds. Not one podcast, but many podcast episodes. Not one conference talk, but dozens, every year.”

You have to constantly, constantly beat the drum. It's not just one blog post that ‘goes viral,’ or one really good HackerNews post. You have to launch not just one blog, but probably tens, or hundreds. Not one podcast, but many podcasts.” -Edith Harbaugh, Cofounder/LaunchDarkly

Harbaugh notes that one key to building a movement is getting out the message through not just repetition, but through effective distribution, once you can properly test and prove which channels matter most to your audience. “Some great advice we got about content: Re-use it as many ways as you can. If you have a big talk you just presented at a conference, slice it and dice it–put the slides online. Redistribute it–you might spend as much time on distribution as you do on the actual content.”

4. Founding Movements By Starting Small

System Initiative CEO and Chef cofounder Adam Jacob points out that you don’t start successful software-defined movements by putting software first. You put people first. “You have to talk to the developers you purport to serve. You have to actually go sit with them, and show them what it is you're building. Listen to the language that they use when they talk about why what you're doing is interesting or valuable or good. And then, you need to say that back to them in that way.”

I think a lot of developer-first companies fall down because they think about ‘being a company’ before they think about serving developers.” -Adam Jacob, CEO/System Initiative

“I think a lot of developer-first companies fall down because they think about ‘being a company’ before they think about serving developers. With that approach, they find themselves getting to the ‘I'm explaining the value prop to my market’ part too quickly, when what they need to be saying is, ‘This is why what we’re building is for this individual human being.’”

“That's how you build that market over time. Sure, eventually, you're going to have a website that speaks to the CEO so that they write a check for the software. But in the beginning, that shouldn't be your focus. It should just be: How tightly can I be connected to the people that I purport to serve? And how quickly can I make that circle small?”

“And another mistake people make is they think, ‘We want to talk to all developers.’ The thing is, it’s a lot easier to ship a product just to me than it is to ship it to 100,000 people, because you can serve me. But maybe you can’t serve everyone. And so, I would advise founders to think about starting small, and then using that language to then grow. When I’m starting out, I can probably describe what I’m building to one person. So if you can just do it for one person, then that helps you understand how to do it for two.”

System Initiative’s Adam Jacob suggests that if you truly want to build a movement, you have to be ready to give ownership of it to your community. (Image courtesy The New Stack)

5. Why It’s Important to Let Developers Own the Movement

Jacob also explains that a community will build a software-defined movement because the community owns the movement. “If you want to build a movement, you have to allow people to thrive in ways that you might not like or expect. Here’s the thing: We start businesses because we want to create a big business. We're hopeful that it finally gets to some kind of liquidity that then brings us personal wealth. But there's art. I tend to think about the technology and the products we build as ‘art.’ And so, there's a thing you want to see in art–that you want to see in the world, and that's a good reason to do it. And that's real and important.”

“But if you're trying to build a movement that's bigger than you, what you need to let other people do is build their own lives on top of it. And you have to let them do that in ways that you might not like or agree with. Because that is what makes the movement theirs. And not yours.”

“If you think about it from an economic perspective, you have to figure out how to align the incentives and the structure of your business. When someone joins this movement, if what they need to do is improve their life through their salary going up, or because they want to start a company, can they do that with the technology? Can they do that inside your movement?”

“Or does your movement say ‘they can't,’ because the movement's actually rooted in ‘Adam making money’–and if you conflict with ‘Adam making money,’ then I kick you out of my movement? At that point, what we really mean is you're building a user community, which can be fine. But if what you're trying to do is build a movement, you have to allow people to take that thing and make it part of their own identity in whatever way that they want it to be. And you have to figure out how to do that well.”

More Resources on Community Building and Software-Defined Movements:

• Video - Crossing the Chasm: From Community to Commercialization with Nick Gottlieb
• Video - Supercharging Your Business, Brand, and Teams with Communities with Jono Bacon
• Full On-Demand Conference Sessions - DevGuild: Software-Defined Movements

Strategic Leadership Skills: Going Beyond Coding

Successful founders cultivate communities around their startups, but also cultivate strategic leadership skills of their own. Leadership skills include, but aren’t limited to, the ability to create a compelling narrative that brings along a community; the ability to use empathy to work with engineers (and handle objections); and the ability to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.

1. Learn How to Be a Storyteller
2. Showing Empathy...And Handling Objections
3. Become a Systems Thinker
4. Speak Authentically to Different Audiences

1. Learn How to Be a Storyteller: The Power of Creating a Narrative

A common thread to founding startups, creating communities, convincing early customers to give your product a shot, and scaling to the enterprise, is storytelling. An extraordinarily important, but often overlooked, step in a startup founding team’s success is when they can express a clear, intelligible message that resonates with their audience. Former Heroku CEO, CloudConnect founder, and Vimeo CEO Adam Gross doesn’t mince words. “Learn how to tell stories. Narrative is key.”

A critical part of breaking through all the noise from competitors, and through your early buyers’ purchasing concerns, is being able to change the realm of the possible for your customers. From day one, a startup founder’s job is to change that worldview from “This situation or process sucks, but we’ve always done it this way’ to ‘A better way does exist.” Gross is emphatic. “You’ll need to create an industry transformation narrative–learn how to do that.”

“Learn how to tell stories. Narrative is key. You’ll need to create an industry transformation narrative–learn how to do that.” -Adam Gross, fmr. CEO/Heroku, Founder/CloudConnect

2. Show Empathy: Leading From, and Handling Objections From, a Place of Empathy

Running a successful software startup is more than just numbers, math, science, and statistics–more than just bug-free code and error-free accounting for payroll. Honeycomb cofounder Christine Yen contextualizes the importance of valuing people as partners, customers, and engineers who may feel naturally resistant to change: “As good as humans can be, there are always going to be pieces that require intuition and understanding. Our team has never tried to minimize the role of humans on an engineering team. We are very conscious of the ‘messy human’ in the middle of all of our bits and bytes.”

Yen reflects on the duality of creating products to solve the problems of engineers–people who have been trained to solve problems by mastering the current set of rules. “The biggest obstacle has always been changing people's mindsets about what's possible. I have come to realize this is very true of engineers: What makes them great at their jobs is looking at a situation, understanding the landscape, understanding how different pieces trade off against each other, taking those rules that they've identified, putting them in their brains, and then building on top of that. And that's how you build resilient systems.”

So much of my and my cofounder’s jobs are not in building technology, but showing people what's possible. To show what they can achieve on the other side and how much better their lives can be. And I don't think we would’ve been able to get this far if we didn't genuinely like people and teams and ‘people problems.’” -Christine Yen, Cofounder/Honeycomb

“However, what happens when someone comes along and tells you, ‘Hey, gravity is no longer 9.8 meters-per-second squared–now it’s 9.3,’ or ‘Hey, what if logging and monitoring weren't explicit trade-offs of each other, and you could get the benefits of both in one tool?’ Sometimes, people resist ideas because what makes them so good at what they do as engineers makes them especially hostile to someone suggesting that those rules change. That’s why so much of my and my cofounder’s jobs are not in building technology necessarily, but instead, showing people what's possible, showing people that it's worth that small bit of effort to push through this cognitive dissonance. To show what they can achieve on the other side and how much better their lives can be. And I don't think we would’ve been able to get this far if we didn't genuinely like people and teams and ‘people problems.’”

3. Become a Systems Thinker: How Changes Affect Your Entire Org

While it may seem obvious when we state it explicitly, startups are complicated beasts with many moving parts. Making changes in one area will have consequences elsewhere–and not always ones we anticipate. Heptio founder and Kubernetes cofounder Joe Beda points out that, “Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows talks about this idea of understanding the connections between things and how if you push here, it's going to impact something else over there. As engineers, especially if you're doing anything with distributed systems, this naturally is the way you approach those technical things.”

Beda notes important nuances, like the difference between proprietary and open source software. “But I would encourage founders to think about business and companies as systems in and of themselves. As you're building your company, you're building a system, defining your values, defining your processes, defining what's important to you. Those are things that are going to define the system. And so, it's not just about the technology. It's about the people, it's about the processes, and all of those things come together to define your system. For example, as developers build open-source projects, they may think, ‘Hey, I'll get everybody using my thing, they’ll love it, it'll be great.’ But why are you doing that? What is the impact? How do you use that to actually drive the rest of your business and understand the connection between those things?”

I would encourage founders to think about business and companies as systems in and of themselves. As you're building your company, you're building a system, defining your values, defining your processes, defining what's important to you. Those are things that are going to define the system. And so, it's not just about the technology. It's about the people, it's about the processes, and all of those things come together to define your system.” -Joe Beda, Kubernetes Co-Founder

4. Speak Authentically to Different Audiences: Authentic Messages for Different People

It has been said, in so many words, that “developers hate marketing,” mainly because developers hate useless, dishonest, timewasters–filling out form after form only to end up with something very different than what they were promised. Developers are busy, focused professionals who, if they’re searching for anything at all, are likely to be looking for things they find useful and valuable. And who’s most likely to offer useful and valuable things? Authentic, trusted people they know.

Empathy matters when selling to developers, says Honeycomb’s Christine Yen. (Image courtesy Monitorama)

Honeycomb’s Christine Yen admits that learning to regularly change and tailor her message for different audiences was “one of the things that was probably the most challenging growing into the CEO role.” Yen describes the process: “It’s about learning how, as an engineer who prides myself on authenticity and correctness and all these things, having to learn how to modulate what I say to an investor audience versus a customer audience, or an employee audience. Which is not to say I'm ‘three-faced,’ but what it means is learning what the specific people in this audience are listening for, what they need, and what they expect. And then finding the correct balance for me and my team–between what they expect, and what I want to give them.”

More Resources on Leadership Skills for Founders:

• Article - How to Build a Successful Founder-Led Sales Strategy by Walter Roth
• Video - Blocking and Tackling on Partnerships with Bill Lapcevic
• Podcast - Human Readable Covers Active Listening with Kedasha Kerr

Get more learnings from a decade of software development from successful founders and community leaders:

• How to Launch a Dev-First Startup: First Principles
• How to Launch a Dev-First Startup: Day-to-Day Tactics
• Technical & Cultural Learnings from 10 Years of Computing
• Advantages of Open-Source Software