What I’ve Learned Building an Online Community of 6.5 Million Developers

Nearly ten years ago, I co-founded what is now known as HackerEarth. Over the course of that time, we’ve built a user base of 6.5 million developers, providing them not only with tools and opportunities to connect with enterprises seeking talent but also with an opportunity to continuously practice and hone their coding skills. HackerEarth today is a vibrant, diverse community, with a wide range of subgroups and segments that each offer something unique and valuable in the form of Hackathons, coding challenges, and learning opportunities.

When you spend this much time building something, and when you interact with so many people, you learn a lot of key lessons along the way. I would never say that every choice we made was perfect, but I believe that we have some valuable insights to offer other founders, entrepreneurs, and leaders who are interested in building, growing, and maintaining a large online community. Here are some of the biggest takeaways from our experience at HackerEarth that we think could be applied beyond our community of developers:

Identify your cheerleaders: The word “influencer” barely existed when we founded HackerEarth in 2012, but the concept has been around for longer than I can remember. When you begin to build a community, the people who will have the biggest impact on your growth will be those who combine an enthusiasm for the community with personal charisma or clout. It shouldn’t be hard to identify these heavy hitters — they tend to make themselves known — but the key is to lean into your relationship with these people to extend their reach as far as possible. In the case of HackerEarth, our first big cheerleaders were top developers at top universities, with which we partnered to host and scale coding contests. Affiliating with these respected people and institutions was huge for building our brand and developing our reputation with developers in the early days.

Keep things fresh: A good product or experience is going to bring people in the door, but you must continue offering something new if you expect to keep people interested. Even the best, most exciting products eventually become stale if they don’t evolve, and an online community is no different. To foster stable, long-term growth, communities need to look beyond what’s working at the moment to see what could work in the future. While HackerEarth hosted as many as eight coding contests per month at some points, we also knew that we needed something else to hold the attention of developers at all levels; that’s what led us to create tools like CodeMonk and our Competitive Coding feature.?

Take an organic approach: Building an online community is like building muscle at the gym. If you focus on eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly, you’ll experience steady, sustainable muscle growth. But if you try to take shortcuts, you’ll end up hurting yourself or failing to maintain your progress. While there are many tempting ways to buy followers or scale rapidly in online communities, these strategies generally end up building nothing but a house of cards. Focus on growing your community organically, creating experiences that draw in new users naturally without trying to force engagement. It may take longer to reach your audience goals, but the results will be far more resilient.

Move away from the monolith: Once your community reaches a certain size, you’ll no longer be able to keep everyone happy with a one-size-fits-all approach. Once HackerEarth reached one million community members, we recognized that we would need to break the community up into smaller micro-communities to ensure people didn’t get lost in the shuffle. Each community’s threshold might look different: for niche audiences, you may need to start differentiating with just 50,000 users. The goal is to keep everyone engaged with material that meets them where they are and provides them with a reason to keep returning.

Be careful with crowdsourcing: If you’ve created a community with a million or more users, you must be offering them something of high quality. But as you continue to grow, it can be tempting to crowdsource with your community to try to create more content (sometimes in search of the goal I just mentioned). At HackerEarth, we worked on around 15 crowdsourced initiatives to help solve some of our challenges; however, the majority of these didn’t work in the long term because our team didn’t have the bandwidth to ensure high quality. Your brand and its reputation are the most valuable resource you have, and you must protect it by always maintaining the highest possible standards.

Reduce friction for stronger engagement: As an online community grows, at a certain point, each new milestone becomes harder and harder to achieve. There are only so many people who are interested in what you have to offer. To continue growing over several years, it’s important to reduce friction for new users or for those with minimal engagement. Don’t give users a reason to stop visiting your community. In our case, we worked to reduce friction for those coming to HackerEarth in search of jobs; once a user uploads their resume, HackerEarth creates a profile for them automatically. This saves time and ensures that the user can move quickly to engage with the other aspects of our community.

Building an online community — whether for 650 people or 6.5 million — is hard work, but it’s rewarding work. Above all, it’s important to recognize that your users are your most important resource, and their passion for your product, service, or experience will be the most important tool in maintaining satisfaction and driving growth.