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.Josh is writing a book on building customer relationships. Follow his journey and insights at www.joshschachter.com---What You'll Learn- Why the first members you pick set the tone foreverThe day-zero choice: community for everyone or for someoneHow to measure community when it's basically a vibeThe trick to getting members to report their own winsGamification with a lowercase G (and why it works)The golden jacket story and pent-up demandWhy developers reject sales and marketing pipelinesScrappy tools beat fancy platforms every timeThe AI warning every new community manager needs---Want the playbook, not just the conversation? Subscribe for deep-dive, actionable breakdowns from every episode at unchurned.substack.com.---Timestamps0:00 - Preview and Meet Jason Dunn2:22 - What community meant at AWS in 20193:45 - The day-zero decision every builder faces5:05 - From 200 invited seeds to 3,600 members6:39 - Keeping the gates too open, too early9:12 - Defining high-value member activity11:23 - Measuring & reporting up: output, reach, and Dev.to14:53 - The Content Reporting Tool (CRT)16:02 - The real motivation behind self-reporting18:24 - The Golden Jacket origin story & 130 jackets in one quarter21:28 - The AWS Community toolkit23:42 - Advice for new community managers51:00 — Don't fall in love with the tools53:00 — Humanity connecting with humanity---Where to Find the GuestJason Dunn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonrobertdunn/---Where to Find Josh:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/Unchurned Substack: https://unchurned.substack.com/

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