#069 – How to Use Patience and Empathy to Reach Millions with Ben Halpern of Dev.to

Indie Hackers

Courtland Allen and Channing Allen

Startups, Entrepreneurship, Makers, Indie, Bootstrapping, Online, Technology, Business, Founders, Bootstrappers, Ideas, Tech, Indiehackers, Hackers

4.9 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 2018

⏱️ 85 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Ben Halpern (@bendhalpern) decided to start another business, he set a very unusual expectation: He gave himself 10 years to succeed. In this episode, we discuss how Ben's patient approach and obsession with understanding things from his users' point of view helped him grow as massive following on Twitter and parlay that into fast-growing online community for developers.Transcript, speaker information, and more: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/069-ben-halpern-of-dev-to

Transcript

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0:00.0	What's up, everyone?
0:08.5	This is Cortland from NDHackers.com and you're listening to the Andy Hackers podcast.
0:12.9	On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes.
0:18.5	How did they get to where they are today?
0:20.0	How do they make decisions both at their companies and in their personal lives? And what makes their businesses tick? Today I'm talking to Ben Halpern, the founder of Dev2. Ben, welcome to the show and thanks for joining me. Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Corland. Dev2 is an online community for programmers where programmers can go to swap ideas and help each other grow.
0:38.0	Is that an accurate description? Yeah, I think that describes it. We act sort of as a social
0:43.6	network, a professional network for software developers, but the way coders really want to get
0:48.7	together and interact really is about their craft, their ideas and stuff like that. So we really
0:53.6	just try to be there for the
0:55.0	humans behind the scenes. And as you know, I also run an online community for ND hackers, for
1:01.6	basically developers who want to learn how to start companies. So this is super fun for me to be able to
1:05.5	have you on this show and really just pick your brain about everything you're doing related to
1:09.0	your community. But first, let's talk about
1:10.8	some of the basics behind Dev2. How long have you been working on this? And who are you
1:15.0	working with? Yeah, so it's kind of amazing how long it's been at this point. Since I started
1:23.5	working on this project in any capacity, it's been about four years, but we've been
1:29.7	working on it sort of as a true earnest business for about a year and a half. And there was probably
1:36.5	another year squeaked in there when I was taking it quite a bit more seriously. So about two
1:42.4	and a half years since I really started thinking it could be a
1:45.1	really cool, great thing. And about a year and a half since we sort of officially thought of it as a
1:53.0	real, like this is our company, our startup, our business. This is an actual business. What are some of the
1:58.4	ways you measure your progress at this point? Are you tracking how many members you have for your community, how many page views you're getting,
	...

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