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Microsoft launches Power Fx, a new open source low-code language
Microsoft today announced Power Fx, a new low-code language that takes its cues from Excel formulas. Power Fx will become the standard for writing logic customization across Microsoft’s own low-code Power Platform, but since the company is open-sourcing the language, Microsoft also hopes that others will implement it as well and that it will become the de facto standard for these kinds of use cases.
Since Power Platform itself targets business users more so than professional developers, it feels like a smart move to leverage their existing knowledge of Excel and their familiarity with Excel formulas to get started.
“We have this long history of programming languages and something really interesting happened over the last 15 years, which is programming languages became free, they became open source and they became community-driven,” Charles Lamanna, the CVP of Power Platform engineering at Microsoft, told me. He noted that even internal languages like C#, TypeScript or Google’s Go are good examples for this.
“That’s been an ongoing trend. And what’s interesting is: that’s all for pro devs and coders. If we go back and look at the low-code/no-code space, there actually are programming languages, like the Excel programming language, or in every low-code/no-code platform has its own programming language. But those aren’t open, those aren’t portable, and those are community-driven,” Lamanna explained.
Microsoft says the language was developed by a team led by Vijay Mital, Robin Abraham, Shon Katzenberger and Darryl Rubin. Beyond Excel, the team also took inspiration from tools and languages like Pascal, Mathematica and Miranda, a functional programming language developed in the 1980s.
Microsoft plans to bring Power Fx to all of its low-code platforms, but given the focus on community, it’ll start making appearances in Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents and elsewhere soon.
But the team clearly hopes that others will adopt it as well. Low-code developers will see it pop up in the formula bars of products like Power Apps Studio, but more sophisticated users will also be able to use it to go to Visual Studio Code and build more complex applications with it.
As the team noted, it focused on not just making the language Excel-like but also having it behave like Excel — or like a REPL, for you high-code programmers out there. That means formulas are declarative and instantly recalculate as developers update their code.
Most low-code/no-code tools these days offer an escape hatch to allow users to either extend their apps with more sophisticated code or have their tool export the entire code base. Because at the end of the day, you can only take these tools so far. By default, they are built to support a wide range of scenarios, but since every company has its own way of doing things, they can’t cover every use case.
“We imagine that probably the majority of developers — and I say ‘developers’ as business users to coders that use Power Platform — will ultimately drop into writing these formulas in some form. The idea is that on that first day that you get started with Power Platform, we’re not going to write any formulas, right? […] It’s a macro recorder, it’s templates. Same thing for Power Apps: it’s pure visual, drag and drop, you don’t write a single formula. But what’s great about Power Platform, in week number two, when you’re using this thing, you learn a little bit more sophistication. You start to use a little bit more of the advanced capabilities. And before you know it, you actually have professionals who are Power Platform or low-code developers because they’re able to go down that spectrum of capability.”
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Census raises $16M Series A to help companies put their data warehouses to work
Census, a startup that helps businesses sync their customer data from their data warehouses to their various business tools like Salesforce and Marketo, today announced that it has raised a $16 million Series A round led by Sequoia Capital. Other participants in this round include Andreessen Horowitz, which led the company’s $4.3 million seed round last year, as well as several notable angles, including Figma CEO Dylan Field, GitHub CTO Jason Warner, Notion COO Akshay Kothari and Rippling CEO Parker Conrad.
The company is part of a new crop of startups that are building on top of data warehouses. The general idea behind Census is to help businesses operationalize the data in their data warehouses, which was traditionally only used for analytics and reporting use cases. But as businesses realized that all the data they needed was already available in their data warehouses and that they could use that as a single source of truth without having to build additional integrations, an ecosystem of companies that operationalize this data started to form.
The company argues that the modern data stack, with data warehouses like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery and Snowflake at its core, offers all of the tools a business needs to extract and transform data (like Fivetran, dbt) and then visualize it (think Looker).
Tools like Census then essentially function as a new layer that sits between the data warehouse and the business tools that can help companies extract value from this data. With that, users can easily sync their product data into a marketing tool like Marketo or a CRM service like Salesforce, for example.
Image Credits: Census
“Three years ago, we were the first to ask, ‘Why are we relying on a clumsy tangle of wires connecting every app when everything we need is already in the warehouse? What if you could leverage your data team to drive operations?’ When the data warehouse is connected to the rest of the business, the possibilities are limitless,” Census explains in today’s announcement. “When we launched, our focus was enabling product-led companies like Figma, Canva, and Notion to drive better marketing, sales, and customer success. Along the way, our customers have pulled Census into more and more scenarios, like auto-prioritizing support tickets in Zendesk, automating invoices in Netsuite, or even integrating with HR systems.“
Census already integrates with dozens of different services and data tools and its customers include the likes of Clearbit, Figma, Fivetran, LogDNA, Loom and Notion.
Looking ahead, Census plans to use the new funding to launch new features like deeper data validation and a visual query experience. In addition, it also plans to launch code-based orchestration to make Census workflows versionable and make it easier to integrate them into an enterprise orchestration system.
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Boast.ai raises $23M to help businesses get their R&D tax credits
Nobody likes dealing with taxes — until the system works in your favor. In many countries, startups can receive tax credits for their R&D work and related employee cost, but as with all things bureaucracy, that’s often a slow and onerous task. Boast.ai aims to make this process far easier, by using a mix of AI and tax experts. The company, which currently has about 1,000 customers, today announced that it has raised a $23 million Series A round led by Radian Capital.
Launched in 2012 by co-founders Alex Popa (CEO) and Lloyed Lobo (president), Boast focuses on helping companies — and especially startups — in the U.S. and Canada claim their R&D tax credits.
“Globally, over $200 billion has been given in R&D incentives to fund businesses, not only in the U.S. and Canada, but the U.K., Australia, France, New Zealand, Ireland give out these incentives,” Lobo explained. “But there’s huge red tape. It’s a cumbersome process. You got to dive in and figure out work that qualifies and what doesn’t. Then you’ve got to file it with your taxes. Then if the government audits you, it’s like a long, laborious process.”
Image Credits: Boast.ai
After working on a few other startup ideas, the co-founders decided to go all-in on Boast. And in the process of working on other ideas, they also realized that AI wasn’t going to be able to do it all, but that it was getting good enough to augment humans to make a complex process like dealing with R&D tax credits scalable.
“The way I think to bootstrap a company is three things,” Lobo explained. “One, customers are looking for an outcome. Get them that outcome in the fastest, cheapest way possible. Two, when you’re doing that, you may have to do a lot of manual work. Figure out what those manual touch points are and then build the workflow to automate that. And once you have those two things, then you’ll have enough data to start working on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Those are the key learnings that we learned the hard way.”
So after doing some of that manual work, Boast can now automatically pull in data using tech tools like JIRA and GitHub and a company’s financial tools like QuickBooks, Gusto and (soon) ADP. It then uses its algorithms to cluster this data, figure out how much time employees spend on projects that would qualify for a tax credit and automate the tax filing process. Throughout the process — and to interact with the government if necessary — the company keeps humans in the loop.
“So all our [customer success] team is engineers,” Lobo noted. “Because if you don’t have engineers they can’t inform the decision-making process. They help figure out if there are any loose ends and then they deal with the audits, communicating with the government and whatnot. That’s how we’re able to effectively get SaaS-like margins or more.”
Ideally, a tool like Boast pays for itself and the company says it has secured more than $150 million in R&D tax credits since launch. Currently, it’s also doubling growth year over year, and that’s what made the founders decide to raise outside money for the first time. That funding will go toward increasing the sales team (which is currently only four people strong) and improving the platform, but Lobo was clear that he doesn’t want to be too aggressive. The goal, he said, is not to have to raise again until Boast can hit the $30 to $50 million revenue mark.
Once fully implemented, Boast also effectively becomes a system of record for all R&D and engineering data. And indeed, that’s the company’s overall vision, with the tax credits being somewhat of a Trojan horse to get to this point. By the middle of next year, the team plans to offer a new product around R&D-based financing, Lobo tells me.
Over the years, the Boast team also focused on not just growing its customer base but also the overall startup ecosystem in the markets in which it operates, with a special focus on Canada. The Boast team, for example, is also the team behind the popular annual Traction conference in Vancouver, Canada (Disclosure: I’ve moderated sessions at the event since its inception). A thriving startup ecosystem creates a larger client base for Boast, too, after all — and coincidently, the team met its investors at the event, too.
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Orbit raises $4M for its community experience platform
Orbit, a startup that is building tools to help organizations build communities around their proprietary and open-source products, today announced that it has raised a $4 million seed funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Casado. A number of angel investors, including Chris Aniszczyk, Jason Warner and Magnus Hillestad, as well as the a16z’s Cultural Leadership Fund, also participated, in addition to previous backers Heavybit and Harrison Metal.
The company describes its service as a “community experience platform.” Currently, Orbit’s focus is on Developer Relations and Community teams, as well as open-source maintainers. There’s no reason the company couldn’t branch out into other verticals as well, though, given that its overall framework is really applicable across all communities.
Orbit team: Patrick Woods, Nicolas Goutay and Josh Dzielak
As Orbit co-founder Patrick Woods told me, community managers have generally had a hard time figuring out who was really contributing to their communities because those contributions can come in lots of forms and often happen across a wide variety of platforms. In addition, the sales and marketing teams also often don’t understand how a community impacts a company’s bottom line. Orbit aggregates all of these contributions across platforms.
“There is a lack of understanding around the ways in which community impacts go-to-market and business value,” Woods told me when I asked him about the genesis of the idea. “There’s a big gap in terms of the tooling associated with that. Many companies agree that community is important, but if you put $1 in the community machine today, it’s hard to know where that’s going to come out — and is it going to come out in terms of $0.50 or $100? This was a set of challenges that we noticed across companies of all sizes.”
Image Credits: Orbit
Especially in open-source communities, there will always be community members who create a lot of value but who don’t have a commercial relationship with a company at all. That makes it even harder for companies to quantify the impact of their communities, even if they agree that community is an important way to grow their business and that, in Orbit’s words, “community is the new pre-sales.”
At the core of Orbit (the company) is Orbit the open-source community framework. The founding team of Woods (CEO) and Josh Dzielak (CTO) developed this framework to help organizations understand how to best build what the team calls a “high gravity community” to attract new members and retain existing ones — and how to evaluate them. You can read more about the concept here.
Image Credits: Orbit
“We’re trying to reframe the discussion away from an extractive worldview that says how much value can we generate from this lead? It’s actually more about how much love can we generate from these community members,” Woods said. “Because, if you think about the culture associated with what we’re trying to do, it’s fundamentally creative and generative. And our goal is really to help people think less about value extraction and more about value creation.”
At the end of the day, though, no matter the philosophy behind your community-building efforts, there has to be a way to measure ROI and turn some of those community members into paying customers. To do that, Orbit currently pulls in data from sources like GitHub, Twitter and Discourse, with support for Slack and other tools coming soon. With that, the service makes it far easier for community managers to keep tabs on what is happening inside their community and who is participating.
Image Credits: Orbit
In addition to the built-in dashboards, Orbit also provides an API to help integrate all of this data into third-party services as well.
“One of the key understandings that drives the Orbit vision is that a community is not a funnel and building a community is not about conversions, but making connections; cultivating dialog and engagement; being open and giving back; and creating value versus trying to capture it,” a16z’s Casado writes. “The model has proven to be very effective, and now Orbit has built a product around it. We strongly believe Orbit is a must-have product for those building developer-focused companies.”
The company is already working with just under 150 companies and its users include the likes of Postman, CircleCI, Kubernetes and Apollo GraphQL.
The company will use the new round, which closed a few weeks ago, to, among other things, build out its go-to-market efforts and develop more integrations.
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Jitsu nabs $2M seed to build open-source data integration platform
Jitsu, a graduate of the Y Combinator Summer 2020 cohort, is developing an open-source data integration platform that helps developers send data to a data warehouse. Today, the startup announced a $2 million seed investment.
Costanoa Ventures led the round with participation from Y Combintaor, The House Fund and SignalFire.
In addition to the open-source version of the software, the company has developed a hosted version that companies can pay to use, which shares the same name as the company. Peter Wysinski, Jitsu’s co-founder and CEO, says a good way to think about his company is an open-source Segment, the customer data integration company that was recently sold to Twilio for $3.2 billion.
But, he says, it goes beyond what Segment provides by allowing you to move all kinds of data, whether customer data, connected device data or other types. “If you look at the space in general, companies want more granularity. So let’s say for example, a couple years ago you wanted to sync just your transactions from QuickBooks to your data warehouse, now you want to capture every single sale at the point of sale. What Jitsu lets you do is capture essentially all of those events, all of those streams, and send them to your data warehouse,” Wysinski explained.
Among the data warehouses it currently supports are Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, PostGres and Snowflake.
The founders built the open-source project called EventNative to help solve problems they themselves were having moving data around at their previous jobs. After putting the open-source version on GitHub a few months ago, they quickly attained 1,000 stars, proving that they had delivered something that solved a common problem for data teams. They then built the hosted version, Jitsu, which went live a couple of weeks ago.
For now, the company is just the two co-founders, Wysinski and CTO Vladimir Klimontovich and couple of contract engineers, but they intend to do some preliminary hiring over the next year to grow the company, most likely adding engineers. As they begin to build out the startup, Wysinski says that being open source will help drive diversity and inclusion in their hiring.
“The goal is essentially to go after that open-source community and hire people from anywhere because engineers aren’t just […] one color or one race, they’re everywhere, and being open source, and especially being in a remote world, makes it so, so much simpler [to build a diverse workforce], and a lot of companies I feel are going down that road,” he said.
He says along that line, the plan is to be a fully remote company, even after the pandemic ends, as they hire from anywhere. The goal is to have quarterly offsite meetings to check in with employees, but do the majority of the work remotely.
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Developer productivity tools startup Raycast raises $2.7M from Accel
Workplace SaaS tools for teams have seen rocket ship growth in the past several years, and that adoption has given rise to a host of software tools geared toward improving individual productivity. Many of the startups behind these tools see building a cult following among individual users as the best way to set themselves up for later enterprise-wide success.
Raycast is a developer-focused productivity tool that aims to be the quickest way to get common tasks done. Today, it’s launching into public beta and sharing with TechCrunch that the team has raised new funding from Accel months after graduating from Y Combinator.
The company has closed a $2.7 million seed round led by Accel, with participation from YC, Jeff Morris Jr.’s Chapter One fund, as well as angel investors Charlie Cheever, Calvin French-Owen and Manik Gupta .
The desktop software takes a note from peers like Superhuman and Command E, allowing users to quickly pull up and modify data with keyboard shortcuts. Users can easily create and re-modify issues in Jira, merge pull requests in GitHub and find documents. The software is very much a developer-focused version of Apple’s Spotlight search that aims to help software engineers navigate with a single tool all the parts of their job that aren’t development work.
Image via Raycast.
Like plenty of workplace tools startups, one of the keys for Raycast is building out a network of extensions that can encompass a user’s workflow. For now, the software supports integrations from Asana, Jira, Zoom, Linear, G Suite, Calendar, GitHub and Reminders, alongside core functionality that can help manage system settings and a calculator that can handle complex math problems. As the startup launches out of public beta, they’re looking to double down on extensions and are rolling out a developer program for early access to their API.
The Mac-only software is free while in public beta, but the company does plan on charging a monthly subscription for the service eventually, though they aren’t quite ready to talk about pricing yet.
Raycast’s team is interested in appealing to individual users for now, but might eventually expand to becoming a teams-level enterprise product that could help onboard new employees faster by quickly orienting them with their office’s software suite, but that’s all a bit down the road, the team says.
“We’re staying focused on single-player mode for a while,” CEO Thomas Paul Mann tells TechCrunch.
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Decrypted: How Twitter was hacked, GitHub DMCA backfires
One week to the U.S. presidential election and things are getting spicy.
It’s not just the rhetoric — hackers are actively working to disrupt the election, officials have said, and last week they came with a concrete example and an unusually quick pointing of blame.
On Wednesday night, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe blamed Iran for an email operation designed to intimidate voters in Florida into voting for President Trump “or else.” Ratcliffe, who didn’t take any questions from reporters and has been accused of politicizing the typically impartial office, said Iran had used voter registration data — which is largely public in the U.S. — to send emails that looked like they came from the far-right group the Proud Boys. Google security researchers also linked the campaign to Iran, which denied claims of its involvement. It’s estimated about 2,500 emails went through in the end, with the rest getting caught in spam filters.
The announcement was lackluster in detail. But experts like John Hultquist, who heads intelligence analysis at FireEye-owned security firm Mandiant, said the incident is “clearly aimed at undermining voter confidence,” just as the Russians attempted during the 2016 election.
THE BIG PICTURE
Twitter was hacked using a fake VPN portal, New York investigation finds
The hackers who broke into Twitter’s network used a fake VPN page to steal the credentials — and two-factor authentication code — of an employee, an investigation by New York’s Department of Financial Affairs found. The state tax division got involved after the hackers then hijacked user accounts using an internal “admin tool” to spread a cryptocurrency scam.
In a report published last week, the department said the hackers called several Twitter employees and used social engineering to trick one employee into entering their username and password on a site that looked like the company’s VPN portal, which most employees use to access the network from home during the pandemic.
Twitter Hack Update: We knew the attackers used the phone & pretended to be IT Support, but now we know the criminals specifically said they were calling about VPN issues, taking advantage of COVID-19 remote work strain. Sadly, these pretexts work often. https://t.co/kKe8XO3MCJ pic.twitter.com/fpE6Afcij1
— Rachel Tobac (@RachelTobac) October 20, 2020
“As the employee entered their credentials into the phishing website, the hackers would simultaneously enter the information into the real Twitter website. This false log-in generated a [two-factor authentication] notification requesting that the employees authenticate themselves, which some of the employees did,” wrote the report. Once onto the network using the employee’s VPN credentials, the hackers used that access to investigate how to access the company’s internal tools.
Twitter said in September that its employees would receive hardware security keys, which would make it far more difficult for a repeat phishing attack to be successful.
Open-source YouTube download tool hit by DMCA takedown, but backfires
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Render raises $4.5M for its DevOps platform
Render, the winner of our Disrupt SF 2019 Startup Battlefield, today announced that it has added another $4.5 million onto its existing seed funding round, bringing total investment into the company to $6.75 million.
The round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from previous investors South Park Commons Fund and a group of angels that includes Lee Fixel, Elad Gil and GitHub CTO (and former VP of Engineering at Heroku) Jason Warner.
The company, which describes itself as a “Zero DevOps alternative to AWS, Azure and Google Cloud,” originally raised a $2.25 million seed round in April 2019, but it got a lot of inbound interest after winning the Disrupt Battlefield. In the end, though, the team decided to simply raise more money from its existing investors.
Current Render users include Cypress.io, Mux, Bloomscape, Zelos, 99designs and Stripe.
“We spoke to a bunch of people after Disrupt, including Ashton Kutcher’s firm, because he was one of the judges,” Render co-founder and CEO Anurag Goel explained. “In the end, we decided that we would just raise more money from our existing investors because we like them and it helped us get a better deal from our existing investors. And they were all super interested in continuing to invest.”
What makes Render stand out is that it fulfills many of the promises of Heroku and maybe Google Cloud’s App Engine. You simply tell it what kind of service you are going to deploy and it handles the deployment and manages the infrastructure for you.
“Our customers are all people who are writing code. And they just want to deploy this code really easily without having to worry about servers, or maintenance, or depending on DevOps teams — or, in many cases, hiring DevOps teams,” Goel said. “DevOps engineers are extremely expensive to hire and extremely hard to find, especially good ones. Our goal is to eliminate all of that work that DevOps people do at every company, because it’s very similar at every company.”
Image Credits: Render
One new feature the company is launching today is preview environments. You can think of them as disposable staging or development environments that developers can spin up to test their code — and Render promises that the testing environment will look the same as your production environment (or you can specify changes, too). Developers can then test their updates collaboratively with QA or their product and sales teams in this environment.
Development teams on Render specify their infrastructure environments in a YAML file and turning on these new preview environments is as easy as setting a flag in that file.
Image Credits: Render
“Once they do that, then for every pull request — because we’re integrated with GitHub and GitLab — we automatically spin up a copy of that environment. That can include anything you have in production, or things like a Redis instance, or managed Postgres database, or Elasticsearch instance, or obviously APIs and web services and static sites,” Goel said. Every time you push a change to that branch or pull request, the environment is automatically updated, too. Once the pull request is closed or merged, Render destroys the environment automatically.
The company will use the new funding to grow its team and build out its service. The plan, Goel tells me, is to raise a larger Series A round next year.
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Grid AI raises $18.6M Series A to help AI researchers and engineers bring their models to production
Grid AI, a startup founded by the inventor of the popular open-source PyTorch Lightning project, William Falcon, that aims to help machine learning engineers work more efficiently, today announced that it has raised an $18.6 million Series A funding round, which closed earlier this summer. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures and firstminute.
Falcon co-founded the company with Luis Capelo, who was previously the head of machine learning at Glossier. Unsurprisingly, the idea here is to take PyTorch Lightning, which launched about a year ago, and turn that into the core of Grid’s service. The main idea behind Lightning is to decouple the data science from the engineering.
The time argues that a few years ago, when data scientists tried to get started with deep learning, they didn’t always have the right expertise and it was hard for them to get everything right.
“Now the industry has an unhealthy aversion to deep learning because of this,” Falcon noted. “Lightning and Grid embed all those tricks into the workflow so you no longer need to be a PhD in AI nor [have] the resources of the major AI companies to get these things to work. This makes the opportunity cost of putting a simple model against a sophisticated neural network a few hours’ worth of effort instead of the months it used to take. When you use Lightning and Grid it’s hard to make mistakes. It’s like if you take a bad photo with your phone but we are the phone and make that photo look super professional AND teach you how to get there on your own.”
As Falcon noted, Grid is meant to help data scientists and other ML professionals “scale to match the workloads required for enterprise use cases.” Lightning itself can get them partially there, but Grid is meant to provide all of the services its users need to scale up their models to solve real-world problems.
What exactly that looks like isn’t quite clear yet, though. “Imagine you can find any GitHub repository out there. You get a local copy on your laptop and without making any code changes you spin up 400 GPUs on AWS — all from your laptop using either a web app or command-line-interface. That’s the Lightning “magic” applied to training and building models at scale,” Falcon said. “It is what we are already known for and has proven to be such a successful paradigm shift that all the other frameworks like Keras or TensorFlow, and companies have taken notice and have started to modify what they do to try to match what we do.”
The service is now in private beta.
With this new funding, Grid, which currently has 25 employees, plans to expand its team and strengthen its corporate offering via both Grid AI and through the open-source project. Falcon tells me that he aims to build a diverse team, not in the least because he himself is an immigrant, born in Venezuela, and a U.S. military veteran.
“I have first-hand knowledge of the extent that unethical AI can have,” he said. “As a result, we have approached hiring our current 25 employees across many backgrounds and experiences. We might be the first AI company that is not all the same Silicon Valley prototype tech-bro.”
“Lightning’s open-source traction piqued my interest when I first learned about it a year ago,” Index Ventures’ Sarah Cannon told me. “So intrigued in fact I remember rushing into a closet in Helsinki while at a conference to have the privacy needed to hear exactly what Will and Luis had built. I promptly called my colleague Bryan Offutt who met Will and Luis in SF and was impressed by the ‘elegance’ of their code. We swiftly decided to participate in their seed round, days later. We feel very privileged to be part of Grid’s journey. After investing in seed, we spent a significant amount with the team, and the more time we spent with them the more conviction we developed. Less than a year later and pre-launch, we knew we wanted to lead their Series A.”
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5 steps for building a thriving developer community
Bear Douglas leads Developer Relations at Slack, where she and her team help developers build more pleasant and productive ways to work.
Every API or platform that has been successful long term owes a large part of their success to a thriving developer community — including Slack. As the lead of our Developer Relations team and a senior marketing manager, we oversee the Slack Platform Community. The community has grown quickly, so we’re both often asked how to successfully build a similar group.
At Slack, our app ecosystem has expanded alongside the product. The Slack App Directory contains 2,200 apps and over 600,000 custom apps (apps people build just for their teams) are used every week. No technology company creates its ecosystem alone. The growth in ours is part of a wider trend, as the total number of APIs has increased by 30% over the last few years. We’re also currently experiencing a surge in app submissions as more workforces operate entirely at home, and companies need tools to support remote operations. In early April, we saw a 100% increase in app submissions week-over-week.
As more developers try a platform, community support is critical to everyone — the platform company, new developers and those who have been developing for years. If your platform doesn’t have a developer community yet, creating one takes a few purposeful steps. Here are some of the best practices we’ve learned over nearly three decades’ worth of combined work in developer communities.
Start (and continue) listening
You can’t build a community without participating in one first. If you already have people developing on your platform, and they’re open to receiving contact from you, reach out! Get to know the people behind the integrations you’re seeing built.
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