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Discussion on: I created @ThePracticalDev and dev.to, ask me anything!

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Arpit Mohan

Have recently joined the dev.to community and it's great! I just wanted to ask how you've gone about building such a community? What have your biggest challenges been in this process?

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Ben Halpern

For whatever reason, this is the sort of thing I've been building or taking part in my whole life. Online communities have been such a big part of my life but I think there's a lot missing from the current space. So I felt like I had a lot of insight and motivation, the rest was drumming up interest on the Internet.

A community is essentially a multi-sided marketplace with supply and demand economics and serious chicken and egg problems. So key was to start with an offering that didn't rely on the network effect and only lean on that once the overall demand was high enough. Things started out as only the @thepracticaldev Twitter account, and a lot of work in bringing value until it was time to move more in the community direction. We're still petal-to-the-metal on growing to avoid the tide of irrelevancy. There is no space for being complacent.