I had just moved from bayi Middle School to Yuelai Apartment, a decision that the startup’s three co-founders thought was both abrupt and a little unreasonable. Especially when we decided to scrap the startup’s first product and turn around and start digging gold. A few weeks ago, AT a Tencent post-90s startup event in Hong Kong, I said we were going to make nuggets. It was a heavy decision, and I tried my best to make it sound positive and exciting.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Soon the startup team decided the company wasn’t growing and decided to quit. I just have to deal with it. Fortunately, we talked about everything flatly, no conflict, no interest entanglements, I can even see from the eyes of the people who left us a trace of doubt and compassion. At this point, Nuggets has just launched a web and Android version, while iOS is still in development. Then, several co-founders went out one after another, to attend the conference in the United States or because of personal matters, the company was just three or two people, with a monthly salary of 4,000 YUAN in hand I did not have the mood to go out to relax.

I sometimes consider myself lucky that I don’t think of anything bad at this time, except for the occasional surge of self-reproach. Then the basic prototype of the nuggets product was made, and at the repeated request of Li Mingze (another start-up member who left later), we also moved to The Haude Innovation Valley in Dinghao Building.

This was the first three months of development and operation for the Nuggets. Product data occasionally rise, occasionally drop, keep in a slow climbing stage, calm.

The Nuggets have been running it relentlessly from the start

Our first product, Rare earth, is ProductHunt for talents. Many things have not been done well. Fortunately, we have accumulated a group of high-quality technical talents, who are well-known entrepreneurs, developers, designers and so on. This allowed us to have one of the earliest enthusiastic users to support us when we started nuggets.

Here’s what the Nuggets looked like when they launched, but we didn’t actually design it ourselves:

Even our original Nuggets logo and icon were designed for free. For a long time, half of my website development iterations were maintained, half of my operations were done, and one more was done, and I didn’t even realize for a long, long time that this was actually the most valuable period of time for the Nuggets from the beginning to the present.

  • Whenever a user posts something new, we add him to wechat and chat with him

  • Whenever a user says a function doesn’t work, we immediately give feedback and add wechat

  • Whenever a user says something is bad, we delete it without a second word and then apologize to the user who shared it

  • .

Day after day, week after week, I would get up in the morning and eat the delicious breakfast made by Jiang Jiang’s mother, walk to dinghao Building, have a bite at the food stall on the fifth floor of the building at noon, and usually eat a Big MAC downstairs after work late at night. We care about what people share on Nuggets, what they read, what they say to us, what they discuss, what they respond to. There is a big event, we first operation nuggets guarantee has relevant content; When there is interesting news, we will follow up and share the content in the first time. Have a good original library, but also constantly share.

There is also a very stupid “rare earth gold digging Daily”, Jiang Jiang will turn the good articles of the day into two-dimensional code one by one every day, to help users can read more conveniently. In fact, this model is very stupid, there is no external chain backflow in wechat, it is very hard to do, the user does not like to see, but it is still silly insist on more than one hundred days to share.

Countless wechat groups to maintain user relationships, help users better access to content. Because of the lack of staff, products are not good enough, wechat operation has become our core work. I remember jiang Jiang and I joked that when we have 10,000 wechat groups, nuggets will become. Who knows, after several brothers joined the company, Nuggets quickly became popular with more people, but I still think it can only be done when nuggets has 10,000 wechat groups.

A good developer community needs a good group of operators

As developers, Stack Overflow, GitHub, and Hacker News are all sites we frequent that have community culture at their core. Of course, it is necessary to make good product tools, but how to let users understand the value of a product depends on the power of operation.

Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood is also one of the best known Coding Horror blog writers in the tech world, and he delivers valuable content and culture to the community every day. Stackoverflow.com therefore has the most knowledgeable operators of the product. In one of his earliest posts, Introducing Stackoverflow.com, he clearly explained what he had in mind for the product:

It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world.

Of course, with the development of SO, its value becomes more and more abundant, but only its operators can best understand why they want to make this product, and insist on operating it to prevent it from violating the original intention.

Paul Graham, the founder of Hacker News, is not to mention the founder of YCombinator and the author of his personal blog. He continuously outputs the best content of technology, entrepreneurship, investment and so on, maintaining the strongest community relationship of YC. Based on this, HN is infused with the earliest community gene, which opposes prejudice but tolerates ideas, shares content but rejects noise, does not worship authority but maintains reputation.

That’s what jiang and I wanted to do with the Nuggets, but a lot of times, I couldn’t do it

Last year, I wrote an article titled “I am not Fenng, nor am I as good at writing articles as Sterling Silver, so I want to be a good technical community.” I lamented that I did not have enough power to mobilize more users to produce valuable content. At that time, Fenng forwarded the article. I also met Fenng in Hangzhou a few days ago and visited his new company. My heart through a little feeling, those silly operation days let the Nuggets come to today, let me have a chance to chat with Fenng.

The nuggets operations team keeps trying. They try AMAs, op-ed articles, translation projects, daily newspapers, etc. We send birthday gifts, heartfelt cards. Most of the time, people will say that we are too slow, there are a lot of things have not done well, we have nuggets of small editor in active protection of our basic law, but this is not enough, we have to taobao xiaoer, Jingdong express little brother, netease xiaobian as the target. Let nuggets grow into a community with the most great content to help developers grow.

Thanksgiving to those who have been with us nearly 2 years of users! The next step for Nuggets is to support original technical content, so we’re going to have to spend a lot more on content operations and content editing.

Therefore, we would like to invite you with experience in content operations management and interest in the technology community to join our operations team.

Send your resume to:[email protected] add me kalasoo on wechat

Yin Ming

July 24, 2017