2.2 KiB
Finding new producers
Base repeatable strategy
Situation
People are interested and enthusiastic about dev.to, we can see that people believe in it and are willing to sign up. What's hard is actually getting them to write a good article, mostly because writing is hard, especially when you feel pressure. So lots of people sign up and don't wind up writing anything. We can improve the onboarding flow but that wouldn't solve the underlying problem.
Proposal
We need to get people who are already primed with content ready to be published. The best case is people who have just published something to Medium.
We comb Medium every day for recently published posts that pass the quick smell test and then message the writers telling them they can and should repost the article to dev.to. We can workshop a good canned message and should be able to make this a daily routine until we no longer need to do it.
I think we could come up with a good division of channels so we could each do some of this stuff without stepping on each others toes, but let's make it extremely systematic, almost automated.
I just experimented by following this protocol with three instances, took me less than a minute. Already got a positive!
Here is a sample one I sent:
Hey, I just came across your Elm article Medium from a few days ago. We'd love to feature some more Elm content on https://dev.to , so I welcome you to repost your medium posts (Elm and otherwise) on https://dev.to if you'd like. It's self-serve so you can sign up and it should only take a couple of minutes. 🙌
Got this response immediately
Ah awesome, yeah I will do. Anything to help spread the word of Elm. :-D Genuinely chuffed that you reached out to me tbh. :-D
I'd say that's pretty fucking awesome. Another awesome sign: I clicked through on three Elm articles on Medium and all three people already followed us. That is, frankly, an amazing position to be in.
Conclusion
This is classic growth hacking and can act as our underlying stream which is super repeatable. We will compliment this with the more high-touch stuff like reaching out to more established developers and more community stuff and more ambitious original content in general.