The incredible rise and success of developer-first companies like Stripe have proven the power of community led-growth. However, while crucial, community building continues to be complex, manual and time-consuming work. In particular, the developer community tech stack is fragmented, with organizations stuck managing endless platforms (including Github, Discord, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) and working with incomplete data. Moreover, traditional sales and marketing don’t work for companies targeting developers. They often rely on thriving developer communities to adopt their products and grow.
In parallel, developers have increased decision and buying power when it comes to the technologies their companies use. For obvious reasons, they prefer rich and authentic exchanges within like-minded peer groups to inform their usage and purchase decisions.
We are excited to back crowd.dev, an open-source community-led growth platform improving how developer-first businesses harness online communities. Founded in 2021 by Jonathan Reimer (CEO) and Joan Reyero (CTO), the Berlin-based company offers a suite of tools to analyze, grow, and leverage online communities to drive business results.
The team believes that the way to developers’ hearts and minds (and ultimately their companies’ budgets) is through authentic community interactions. In other words, developer-first businesses need communities as a growth channel. Jonathan, who previously built communities in the open-source space, experienced firsthand the difficulties involved, with no existing tools that supported the integrations and features he needed.
Created with the belief that the future of business relies on thriving communities – particularly in the fast-growing open-source space, crowd.dev is the very first open-source developer community tool on the market. In addition to common reasons, like data privacy, customizability, and code longevity, the decision to go open-source was driven by creating a community where developers come together to build out the software for different use cases. The applications for community-led software are endless, from customer service tools that recognize unsolved issues on community platforms to recruiting software that considers community contributions.
Jonathan Reimer emphasizes: “Community-led growth has been a topic for every developer-focussed company we talked to. We built crowd.dev with the vision to help companies find, engage, support, and collaborate with the right developers, to ultimately help them reach their growth goals through a vibrant community. Our open-source approach means customers can own their data and, more importantly, it enables us to build a thriving, open community of developers and companies around crowd.dev.”
crowd.dev users can choose between a self-hosted or hosted version. The platform is also open to extensions and provides users complete control over their community’s data. Furthermore, it aggregates data across developer communities and provides analytics, workflow automations, and insights to fuel growth.
Premium tools are available modularly and can be selected depending on each user’s unique requirements. If a user is looking to grow their community, the Eagle Eye app allows them to find and engage with the right content across channels like Hacker News and DEV. If companies wish to improve their support content and search ranking, crowd.dev’s Community Help Center App automatically publishes landing pages with community-generated support content discoverable by search engines.
Since March 2022, several hundred organizations have joined the company’s beta, including the likes of Microsoft, Meilisearch, Code Intelligence, ZenML, Distributed, and the Linux Foundation.
On why we invested, our Venture Partner, Devin Hunt, comments:
“We at Seedcamp have backed many developer-first companies, and we have seen firsthand how important community building is to their long-term growth. crowd.dev’s tools give a startup all they need to hit the ground running. Their open-source, developer-first approach is a game changer for any business whose developer community is critical to their success.”
We are excited to co-lead crowd.dev’s €2.2 million pre-seed round alongside Lightbird, with participation from Possible Ventures, Angel Invest, NevrSeen, and notable angel investors, including Russ Heddleston, Cedric Sellin, Christian Stiebner, and Matthäus Krzykowski. The fresh funds will go towards strengthening the core community, extending the product, adding more applications and data integrations, as well as making it generally available to the public.
For more information visit crowd.dev.
Today also marks the release of their open-source offering, so make sure you check out crowd.dev/github.