How Luos uses crowd.dev to identify key community members & build authentic relationships

Luos is an open-source and real-time distributed micro-service orchestrator for embedded systems. It uses a modular methodology to simplify complex components or applications together as a single system image. 

We talked with Nicolas Lorenzi, Head of User Acquisition and Growth at Luos, about how he and his team use crowd.dev to execute their community-led growth strategy. 

Luos’s community objectives

Luos is built by developers for developers. They’ve made growing a passionate community that can deliver value to its members central to their business. As part of their open-source philosophy, Luos strongly encourages users to share projects using their technology with each other and collaborate. 

Luos has identified three main objectives for its developer community:

• Understand user expectations and problems and be able to address them.
• Build relationships with a diverse and international user base.
• Encourage users to collaborate and contribute to the project.

Challenges in community building

The Luos team started prioritizing community building in early 2021 and experienced a huge surge in members. “Our Discord community started less than a year ago, and it’s now over 11,000 developers – and doubled in the past two months”, explains Nicolas. 

While Discord is their main community channel, members interact with them through GitHub, Twitter, DEV.to, Reddit, and Hacker News. What previously was a very manageable group of developers was taking a lot more work and attention to be able to understand, build relationships with, and continuously engage the community. 

Solution: Driving community-led growth with crowd.dev

The Luos team started using crowd.dev to overcome these challenges and execute on their community objectives. The main ways in which they used crowd.dev to help them has been to

• Identify key opinion leaders and highly engaged community members.
• Build authentic relationships with these developers.
• Understand what content to create to deliver value and keep engagement high. 

Identifying key opinion leaders 

With 11,000+ community members, it is difficult to manually monitor and determine which ones are crucial for Luos to keep engaged and spend their time on. With crowd.dev Luos has been able to connect their Discord and other community channels and pull insights from the data. To identify developers who are key opinion leaders and highly engaged members, Luos mainly uses crowd.dev’s Members' directory.

‍“The Members directory lists all of the people in our community across channels. We can then instantly search, sort, and filter the list according to our needs.”

Luos can filter for members with high engagement levels, which the crowd.dev algorithm classifies as “Fan” or “Ultra” engaged. Luos can then further filter for crucial information like social following and any custom tags they have created unique to their community. 

Luos’s member page filtered for highly engaged community members

Building authentic relationships with key members 

Once the team has narrowed down and identified members that match certain criteria, they can spend their time and resources to engage exactly these members. For this, the crowd.dev member profiles come in handy. In the member profiles, the Luos team can see all the past activities of a particular member and other information.

“We can easily pick out the most engaged and influential members and dig into their member profiles in crowd.dev. This enables us to personalize our future communication with them accordingly, Instead of generic and marketing-driven messages, we can build more authentic relationships," says Nicolas.

Example member’s profile

Understanding what content to create to deliver value & engagement

A central part of creating a valuable and engaged community is producing the right kind of content for them. crowd.dev has helped Luos stay on top and analyze all the activities in their community to identify topics of interest. 

Luos can search all past activities and conversations on their activity page and filter according to what member segment they are trying to learn about. 

“In community platforms, a huge problem is that retrieving past activities is a pain, and you lose valuable data over time. crowd.dev avoids this and helps us retrieve that data when needed and in one place. We’ve been able to create much more interesting content for our community and make a database of topics we know work best.”

The crowd.dev activity feed with recent activities and all conversations 

Before using crowd.dev, Luos had taken the approach to focus mainly on SEO.

‍“We sometimes relied too heavily on what other sites were telling us about trending keywords in our space and let our own opinions influence our content. Instead, with crowd.dev, we now focus on what our community is asking for and talking about when choosing what to produce, and this has been more effective,” Nicolas explains. 

Looking ahead

With ambitious growth plans in the year ahead, Luos is all in with its community-led approach to product adoption and development. The team is gearing up for further internationalization and will continue to rely on community building and insights, with the help of crowd.dev, to better understand and deliver the right product and content to its growing and more diverse user base. 

Luos has also written extensively about their approach to building a discord community; check out their blog for more here.

You can try out crowd.dev for free to unlock community-led growth for your developer tool.