Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (00:00)
Hello everyone, today we diving into one of the most fascinating parts of open source growth, which is how to nurture and scale a developer community that actually participates and sticks around. And to unpack this, we have with us Milica from literally.dev, who has led community at Wasp and Hashnode and has built developer ecosystems from the ground up. Milica, so great to have you here with us.
Milica Maksimovic (00:24)
Thank you for inviting me first and foremost. I like giving out tips and tricks and, talking about my experiences and like what I figured out and like what things work. So I'm really grateful ⁓ for this opportunity from you.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (00:38)
Wonderful. So, Melissa, before we get into the frameworks and the tactics, I would love to understand a bit about your journey. How did you first get into working with developer communities?
Milica Maksimovic (00:49)
⁓ Well, my journey actually started in, I think, 2016.
And I was actually on a thinking of becoming a developer myself. And I actually was interested in coding and I started working with Linux and then I started reading all these ⁓ books about like how systems work and like how networks work and all of that. And it was insanely fun. But at the same time, my background is in English language.
language
and literature. And I actually really enjoy working with text.
⁓ I saw a ad for a technical content editor time. And it was like, wow, you know, I can start working on this. And I was actually part of Semaphore community. So Semaphore CI.
at the time, ⁓ was pushing out these amazingly high-value blog posts. So we were basically teaching people how to write tests so that you could effectively use CI systems.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (01:46)
important.
Milica Maksimovic (01:49)
I first learned ⁓ like how to organically use ⁓ Reddit. And that's also when I became an Actioned user myself, when I was like trying to find, you know, where do developers hang out and like, where can I distribute this high value
content
maybe a year or two afterwards, I actually joined Hashnode. I was like really focused, you know, at growing groups. ⁓ So it was still a bit of like, okay, we're
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (02:14)
got it.
Milica Maksimovic (02:18)
Can I share the story about Hashnode
We were really trying to nurture people who are going to be thoughtful, gentle in terms of communication and so on. So that's kind of how I started. then from there it grew.
And here I am today, basically helping people how to do that for themselves.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (02:39)
Militia is such an interesting
story, someone who has a background in English to running communities and then to sort of doing technical content writing. I think that's amazing, amazing what you've been able to sort of do.
Milica Maksimovic (02:53)
Yeah, I mean, to be honest, like I can do technical content writing, but I think my core skill is in organizing, ⁓ actually building these teams ⁓ that are going to create high value content and being able to connect the dots between the community, or creating content for community
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (03:13)
interesting that you know you bring this up because that was going to be my next question. That you know every company defines community very differently. For some it's engagement, for some it's contribution. You mentioned business goals, right? ⁓ I'm curious what it means for you in your world.
Milica Maksimovic (03:28)
⁓ you know, it's, hard to, pinpoint it. but I can say, like, I can use examples. So for example, I worked at Wasp, ⁓ which is an open source framework, So they don't have, ⁓ business in terms of like your standard SaaS. for them, what community means is a group of people that who are going to support their work, you know, who are going to give feedback on what they're doing, who are going to test the framework, give them stars.
write about them online, Twitter, LinkedIn, wherever. ⁓ And basically there we were focused on identifying who are the users we are a good fit for right now and how can we bring them onto our Discord and how can we get them excited about us as a framework.
If you are in an alpha stage, you're essentially going to get tech enthusiasts to give you some feedback, to try you out. When you get into beta, you're still targeting those enthusiasts or indie hackers or people who are like, ⁓ this is new technology. I want to test it out. I want to try it. So there you need to know, okay, who am I a good fit for? And if you are in beta, there's going to be
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (04:21)
Shut.
Milica Maksimovic (04:40)
suspicion, let's say on user Zen because like, I can't wait until you get out of beta because beta is usually a signal for production ready. But at Wasp, I think they're almost ready to go out of beta. So we were like, okay, how can we get people who are builders or promoting success stories showing to others that like, hey, you can build this tool yourself by using this open source framework.
you
And, know, basically that's, that's one angle, but on the other, on the angle, like if you have a SaaS, why should you build a community? And the answer is, ⁓ you need to learn about your users and there is no better way to engage and interact with people. if you have a community in whatever shape, you know, it can be comments under your blog posts. It can be a discord. It can be a slack. It really depends again on.
who you are targeting, where your users are, where they used to being. But you need to align basically your business with your users. And when you're talking to developers, like in a standard company, the sales team and the CEO are the ones who know the most about users. can't gatekeep that knowledge and it's hard to pass it on to the rest of the team all the time. It's much easier to build a community
everyone from your company onto that community so you have that passive learning and then again you connect with users you get to understand their frustrations pain points and why do people come to someone's discord they have a question they can do something themselves like you know developers are not very happy to sit on sales calls
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (06:20)
Mm-hmm.
Milica Maksimovic (06:27)
they think it's a waste of time. So they are going to dig deep into documentation and if they can't figure something out, they're either going to reach out to support or they're going to go online. They're going to be like Reddit or Discord or wherever your community is and they're going to ask a question and there you need to show that we are here for you, we understand you, this is how you solve it, this is a common problem, la la la.
And that's how you build a community. You are there for them when they need it. And then, you know, the easiest part is building out the random channel and, you know, like spamming memes and all of that. people...
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (06:56)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Thank
Milica Maksimovic (07:05)
don't understand what core metrics should be and the core metric for a community is like how fast did you solve someone's problem? It's not like how many, messages in random do we have? Like, this looks silent. It's those channels, the support channel is actually the main engagement channel for the majority, I think, of communities ⁓ these days.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (07:24)
Mm-hmm.
No, think that's really powerful and so strong. So, Milica how did you decide that Discord was going to be one platform that you use? Because is it something that was already sort of present when you joined HashNode or how was that structured?
Milica Maksimovic (07:44)
It started when I was there ⁓ at Hashnode. We built the Discord community because it just started. I think Discord was seen as this gaming thing And it also so happened that Slack started...
pushing people to pay, let's say. So, again, we are talking year, what was it? 2017, 18, ⁓ Slack groups were very hot, but then you had to pay per member and suddenly things got very expensive and you also lose the knowledge. Like you can have a free Slack group, but then the history is gone. So people were like, naturally, you know, developers, they're like,
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (08:08)
Thank
order.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Milica Maksimovic (08:27)
we were just gonna find an alternative or build something ourselves. Discord just appeared. I think the core reason is because it's free and you can access history.
It was, I think, one of the first communities where developers from like front end developers were really aligning and learning from each other. And like we were talking, I think 60, 70,000 people.
Hashtag today still has that community, but Hashnode's primary reason for, they first started as an online community and it looked a lot like Reddit today. So hashnode I worked at looked like Reddit just for the
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (09:00)
Okay. ⁓
Milica Maksimovic (09:05)
developers. And then we started migrating. We started noticing that like people were writing like these really long responses. We're like, this is a blog post. ⁓ So we kind of went down the Facebook route of like, hey, this is now your profile and you can write these long posts and like post them and like people can subscribe to it.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (09:28)
And apart from Discord, is there any other starting stack that is really useful for open source communities?
Milica Maksimovic (09:36)
It depends on the product, it depends on the company, it depends on the users. ⁓ Why am I saying this? For example, if you are small, if you're just starting out, what's your capacity?
How big is your team? Can you manage that? Do you have some guidelines set? Moderation is the first thing you actually have to think about, some moderation and the size of the team. Because if your team is small, you can't moderate a lot, then maybe it's better to rely on having a subreddit on Reddit and saying like, hey, this is where we are, we hang out. You can ask questions here. And then you know that Reddit
moderators and Reddit as a whole have a built-in system so you don't have to worry too much. ⁓ Then there's discord I think you are, if you want a forum. You can just white label it. And then you have full features of forum.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (10:21)
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Milica Maksimovic (10:31)
Slack works great if you are ⁓ targeting a certain type of people.
maybe you should think about that first before just starting a community we have 30 people. Awesome. What are you going to do that?
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (10:42)
Yeah.
interesting that you talk about moderation as the first thing. And you also mentioned that you had asked a question at Stack Overflow, it didn't go well. So I wanted to understand when you were running the community, what expectations or norms did you set early on so the community stayed healthy? And did you face any moderation challenges?
Milica Maksimovic (11:03)
Let's just say that we didn't have automation back then. when I was there, we had half a million people active. it was crazy. The community was growing fast. ⁓ So there, you need to have some automation, but you still have to
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (11:11)
wow.
Milica Maksimovic (11:23)
respond to comments, you have to read, you have to be present. And I was lucky that we had internal tools built in and I was able to see things as they were coming in.
So for me, the number one thing I recommend to people is contributor covenant code of conduct. So ⁓ this is a well-known tool, in the open source communities.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (11:46)
So Milica, for a community this size, how many people were involved in the moderation process? What took to keep this community active?
Milica Maksimovic (11:56)
the entirety of our company.
entirety, like everyone, everyone with admin access had the right to it because we had a decent time zone difference, but still, ⁓ US time was a bit hard for us. I was covering, let's say Europe time, and then they were covering the Eastern time, let's say. So it was hard for me to moderate people who are in Australia, but it's easier if you're in India to moderate, people.
Australia. And I also remember staying up really late, know, making sure that people who woke up or are, you know, in full force in the US, we were there. Of course it was automated, like at certain point you can't, you had to automate it, but still things were happening.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (12:41)
think moderation is a beast. I didn't sort of realize that there's so much that goes into it. And I think another big beast is, and one of the toughest parts of building a community is how do you drive real engagement? You want people to talk about the right things, ⁓ So how did you get people to actually participate? And what sort of participation were you actually looking for realistically?
Milica Maksimovic (13:04)
It was easy for us back then because Stack Overflow was full of senior people who did not have the patience And how Hashnode started, they basically built it a span of, I don't know, a couple of days. I think it started with your average story frustration. So I think one of the founders,
asked a question on Stack Overflow and got banned because it was like, don't know, whatever reason. It's super easy to get banned on Stack Overflow or like blocked or like to get your post deleted.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (13:40)
something like Reddit, where you have to earn your karma before you're able to sort of do a lot of things.
Milica Maksimovic (13:45)
Yes, yes, yes, exactly. So the
same thing happened ⁓ on stack overflow, but they were a lot more extreme.
And then it became like, hey, you are really important if you have karma on Stack Overflow. it's not great for juniors. And there's a lot of what I call stupid questions. So stupid question is stupid when a senior asks another senior how to do this. not stupid when someone who's just started working on this needs a mentor to guide them. ⁓
we were very focused on juniors, we were very focused on people who were into mentoring, so we had, and again this happened also very organically naturally, we had a group of seniors who were really generous in sharing their knowledge, and then you had a group of juniors that were very comfortable with asking these questions and like, you know, I'm stuck at work, this doesn't work, what should I do? And
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (14:26)
Okay.
Milica Maksimovic (14:42)
they were naturally coming to to hash node to ask those questions. You sometimes the team, ⁓ if they could, they would answer the question. I remember myself like answering a ton of those at the time. And sometimes it's just you need someone to guide you in the right direction.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (15:00)
Yeah, no, I think that sounds like a task. But that's so great that you were able to create a space where the juniors were so ⁓ comfortable sharing their questions. And you were able to attract seniors who were that generous that they were able to sort of answer. I think that's where the real value of the community came from.
Milica Maksimovic (15:18)
Yeah, exactly. And I think we had some mentoring sessions even, like we were trying to think of ways in which we can like connect them on a, like, do you want a mentor? So can we, connect you? but like the angle was friendliness.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (15:33)
Got it. so while I understand that ⁓ a lot of interaction happened because this was the natural community for juniors to sort of join and get their questions answered, but did you run any more experiments which sort of boosted engagement further? Did you do any offline sessions? Was it completely online? How was that?
Milica Maksimovic (15:51)
We were doing...
everything. I think I tried everything. So we were partnering with other communities. So for example, at the time, think Flutter, we were one of their official communities. So the goal is like, you need to network, you need to network with frameworks, you need to network with languages, they need to recommend you and to be like, hey, if you want community support, this is one of the places where you can get that community support. So ⁓ that was one
of the ways we were growing. The other way was like inviting these ⁓ influential people from different communities and you know if I'm focused on growing a Go community then I'm going to find you know a Go ⁓ dev rels were just starting so like we were really collaborating with a lot of dev rels there, live events as well. So ⁓ we were able to identify a group of people who were really ⁓ let's say engaged and nice and
created this nice environment online. And then we were like, okay, where are you? Do you want to become a hashnode ambassador? So we had an ambassador program.
and we would ship them goodies and they would ⁓ organize events ⁓ and they would just ⁓ give goodies out to people in the audience. That was also something that we were doing. And you can see the spikes. But again, the issue is when you want to build a global community.
You can't just be focused on one region or one country like, are you going to do this? How are you going to increase the number of people from Europe? you need to organize a lot of meetups in Europe. So we were doing that as well, but I think ⁓ the most influential thing we did was AMAs. I think those brought ⁓ a lot of growth and it's, ⁓ I think the term is
still community hijacking. So, you you promote someone within your community, they promote you within their community and then, you know, stars align. Did I post a ton of posts on Medium? Sure I did. Medium was alive and well at that time. ⁓ So like we were talking everywhere about us we were trying to get, you know, users at the same time. And, you know, we got banned ⁓ from posting.
I think like the domain was kind of shadow bad. think on hacker news.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (18:16)
And from what I understand, AMAs were the ones which were the most successful, which gave me the most traction.
Milica Maksimovic (18:23)
Yes.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (18:24)
Understood. Make sense. And what were some of the metrics that you were tracking? You did mention a few briefly that you were looking at engagement, were looking at the posts, likes, comments. But if you had to define the key metrics, what would they be?
Milica Maksimovic (18:37)
like the signups.
for sure, new users, you want to increase the number of users and you wanna retain them and you want to measure their engagement over time. I think this is your standard, I didn't even say SaaS usage metrics. So you want to get someone to learn about you, start using you, like the community and start commenting and helping out others or asking questions. Like we were focused on having monthly active users, those that like increasing monthly active users.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (18:51)
What did?
Milica Maksimovic (19:09)
having high numbers of signups was something that we were optimizing for. But if you have a community on Discord, for example, it depends again on what type of community you are. Is it open source? Great. Then, know, engagement, comments, ⁓ know, support answer.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (19:26)
makes sense. What is the biggest mistake that you see DevTools make when they're trying to build like a community?
Milica Maksimovic (19:33)
building a Discord and forgetting about it, but still keeping it on top of their homepage. And that comes back to, do you have the guidelines? Do you have the team? If you don't have the team, like the worst part of building a community is the feeling of emptiness, of like...
there's no people here like tumbleweed you rolling you know you see something and it's like empty ⁓ and that again ⁓ do you have enough users for that
Is that a smart investment? Do you really need it? Because if people aren't there and if they're not asking questions, I don't know, maybe you have a super cool tool that has no bugs and everything is so amazingly well done, no one has any questions. Because essentially we're talking about developers. talking about deeply technical people who can solve their own problems. So they're going to go to docs and if they get stuck, again, they're going to come to
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (20:18)
me.
Milica Maksimovic (20:35)
you. ⁓ Another thing I think is being very lenient with moderation and this is also my biggest mistake. I don't think I've...
said this anywhere in this shape and form, but like I remember this one person at Hashnode who was super senior, like who I think started using Commodore whatever, you know, version ⁓ as their first computer. ⁓ And they were full of knowledge, but they were also insanely toxic. we had to moderate their answers all the time. And then like we learned that this guy had a terminal illness and he had
I think the internet was his vent in a way
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (21:16)
Bye.
Milica Maksimovic (21:17)
And then I won't name names, but like there was this emerging tech at the time and he was talking very badly about the tool and like how it brought bloat and like you shouldn't be doing this that way. CEO of that company saw that and he never again wanted to work with us.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (21:22)
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
Milica Maksimovic (21:37)
And then I was like, this is on us, but
Like how are you going to balance it? Like it's not simple, moderation requires you to be empathetic, but like you also have to be strict
Like you respond on a very human level, but on the other hand, the level of respect we had towards him was not the level of respect he had towards our users. And letting him go was a team discussion a month long. But in the end we had to ban him.
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (21:52)
Yeah.
Milica is such a human angle and I think that's so less talked about and so overlooked. Because these are real stories as you said, right? These are things that happen and you need to be prepared for when they happen.
I think that's such a revelation to me, ⁓ the challenges of running a community. As to me, I just wanted to zoom out a bit and ask you that if there's a founder or a person who's just starting off a community, where should they begin? What should they think of?
Milica Maksimovic (22:37)
They should talk to their users. First and foremost, again, what type of ⁓ company are you running? What type of users do you need? Are your users in enterprise or do you need juniors to get started and to get them excited? Because that's the difference between going to LinkedIn or Slack versus going to Discord, for example. ⁓
you have to again ⁓ ask yourself what would they prefer? What makes sense for them? Would they even?
Is it maybe better for you to have things organized by topics? so, maybe an online forum with a bit more of a async sprinkle is going to work better for you because it's going to be easier for people to find their way around.
First of all, why are they even using my tool? Second thing is, do they need help in setting up onboarding? How easy it is for them? Would they benefit from connecting to someone who is exactly like them? Setting up this tool, having these issues. Can I somehow connect them with one another?
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (23:34)
I think it's going to help so many early DevTools and OSS founders, you know, how to avoid pitfalls and how to build communications that last. Thank you so much, taking out the time and giving us your ⁓ hard-earned lessons and such practical frameworks.
Milica Maksimovic (24:02)
Yeah. And if I can add one more thing to it, like GitHub stars, that's a whole other game. And I know that people think that like ⁓ GitHub stars indicate the community size and there's that I argued that there is no further thing from the truth. So I would also say, you know, focus, if you are an early, ⁓ early stage open source startup, focus on growing users and stars will come and you can influence stars in one way or another. there's a time
of games you can play for getting those likes. But stars to me are likes and the engagement and communication and all the questions you can get, that's the community aspect that you need to nurture rather than being obsessed with like, how many stars did we get today?
Disha Agarwal - Reo.Dev (24:35)
Yeah.
No, definitely. It definitely makes more sense. That's the meaningful engagement that you're sort of talking about. So again, thank you so much, Milica for taking out time and sharing your so illustrious journey of taking care of communities. And I think the work that you've done and the work that you're doing, it's so amazing. Thank you so much for your time today.
Milica Maksimovic (25:15)
Thank you for inviting me and I hope to see you in some conference soon.
