Jason Dunn

🎤 Back in May I was a guest on the Gainsight podcast, “Unchurned”, with host Josh Schachter and the episode went live recently.

We had an excellent conversation about building communities, the importance of the tone early members set, and how metrics that matter to community program managers — such as community active rate — might have no relevance to senior leaders. Community managers need to be prepared to answer the “So what?” question and point to metrics that impact team goals.

You can also listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if that’s your thing! Here’s a summary from the Gainsight blog post:

Two hands. A free Slack channel. A spreadsheet. That was the entire toolkit when AWS asked Jason Dunn to build a developer community.

Jason Dunn spent five years on building something people actually want to belong to. He grew a developer community into thousands of members spread across more than a hundred countries, working with far less budget and tooling than you’d expect.

This conversation digs into what separates a living community from a glorified contact list. Why your earliest members carry so much weight. When to keep the door open and when to guard it. How to prove value when your best wins resist a dashboard. Why technical people walk the second something smells like a pitch. And how one small, slightly absurd reward became a badge people chased for months. A Real talk on getting people to show up for each other.