Dev.to

Ben Halpern started with an experiment rather than a business plan. He registered a Twitter account called The Practical Dev to share useful software advice, in reaction to what he saw as too many people on stage shouting about impractical solutions. For about a year he posted links he found on Hacker News and Reddit, scheduling them with little conscious effort. He had learned from earlier mistakes, including a sports nutrition site in college that burned him out after he pushed growth too hard, that patience mattered. He gave himself ten years on the project.

Halpern decided to build the community platform himself, from scratch. He wanted to escape the constraints of existing tools. Medium was the common home for developer writing, but he felt it was not built for software developers and never would be, because its core abstraction was general publication. He prioritized performance and minimalism, shipping pages in fewer bytes and avoiding heavy ads and JavaScript frameworks. He admitted early versions had major bugs. He also said the team could have launched on WordPress in a day, but that would have locked them into someone else's abstractions.

The first publishers were mostly internet friends. Halpern kept the project quiet until it had teammates, a habit he took from advice to keep unfinished work secret. When a Twitter follower, Jennifer Konokowski, DMed him asking to share something on the Twitter account, he invited her to repost it on the platform. She became the first publisher besides him. He encouraged cross-posting content from personal blogs, which he later saw as a big inflection point for growth. He accepted nearly all early submissions and led by example, for instance by signing his posts with 'happy coding', which others copied.

The Twitter audience was the engine. Original parody O'Reilly book covers became a 'smash hit' and drove growth, after the account had reached about 10,000 to 12,000 followers. Halpern said his best lesson was to listen to what developers cared about rather than broadcast self-interested posts. Growth was not a straight line. Reddit consistently banned the site, and the bottleneck was getting people to spend time writing. Halpern and his co-founders also said the startup treadmill of chasing numbers for investors was exhausting, so they chose to avoid it and stay experimental.

The platform has nearly 100,000 registered developers and about 1.5 million unique visitors per month, with growth of 15 to 20 percent for several months. Halpern said that the team is now three founders plus three employees on salaries. Their main revenue is a monthly sponsorship arrangement with a few companies, supplemented by a pay-what-you-want membership. They have not disclosed revenue figures.