By Senior Editor – Kris Smith (@croncast)

As startups enter the marketplace they are often looking for early adopters and evangelists for their product. A great way to get users on board is to create a developer community around the core product. A developer community is more involved than typical community creation.

A typical community is created through early access in a alpha or beta stage. Requests are made of the early adopters to give feedback on the product through message boards, email or most recently services like GetSatisfaction. It is the norm for these types of communities to focus on putting out fires due to outtages or product redesign. A developer community is different.

Developer community is a vessel of evangelism, product roadmap and pool of potential employees.

Here’s how to create and groom a developer community:

1. It needs to be a win

The first thing to do is to understand what motivates a developer. There are plenty of things but the esoteric problem solving is at the top of that list.

2. Treat the developers like rock stars

Go above and beyond to make sure that developers feel appreciated and reward them with contests, prizes, full code examples in a few languages and complete documentation. Also, let them see inside your company and work with your staff.

3. Allow them to create the next big thing

This pays two dividends to developers – credibility and monetary.  Developers can advance in their career by developing apps around your product or create job stability for themselves – think legacy products. Enough said on this one.

4. Grooming

During this stage there are two things that are important: a staff member(s) dedicated to supporting the community and continuing to quench their desire to be best problem solver in room. On the latter, they often they are, so keep feeding them challenges.

A successful developer program depends on the amount of effort that your business puts into it. The yield of the program depends on it. Sun Microsystems and Intel are two great examples of engaged and active developer communities.

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