192. How AWS’s Developer Community Grew 3,600 Builders Across 110 Countries ft. Jason Dunn

It’s been around for maybe four, four and a half years at this point, and we have over 25,000 things that had been submitted.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So pause right there. How do they want to celebrate you? I’m trying to figure out what the true motivation because that’s extra work for that. I mean, we can’t even get our sellers and neither can any company sellers to go and update Salesforce, right? So, like, how are we getting community builders for a different company to go in there and tell you what they just did? Like, either they’re just like truly fanatical fans, or they’re getting 50 bucks a pop for every time they update your CRM with what they’ve done. I mean, what’s the incentive? You’re listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight Podcast network. When AWS asked Jason Dunn to build a developer community, his entire toolkit was this. Two hands, a free Slack channel, and a spreadsheet. No platform, no budget. Five years later, that community had grown to 3,600 builders across 110 countries.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Jason learned the line almost everyone gets wrong. The one between a real community and just another marketing list today, what it actually takes to get people to show up for each other. I’m Josh Schachter. This is Unchurned. Subscribe to our substack@ Unchurned.Gainsight.com where we go deep on every episode. Like how one post sales team at cloudbeds built over 150 AI agents. That story and more at unchurned.gainsight.com hey everybody. Welcome to this episode of Unchurned.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I’m your host, Josh Schacter, senior vice president of strategy and go to market development. And I’m very excited to be here with Jason Dunn. Jason was the principal developer community program manager at Amazon Web Services AWS where he built the community for developers. Jason, thank you so much and welcome to the program.

Jason Dunn:
Hey, yeah, super happy to be here, Josh. Appreciate you inviting me on.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So it’s such a strong program that you built over those years. And honestly, when I’m thinking about what value can this serve for our audience? We speak to post sales professionals, leaders and we speak to as a function of that, we speak to community builders. So I want all the glory details of building what is, in my very like, naive view, one of the preeminent developer communities. You know, aws. Take us back to when you started, when you started, you know, working on this. What, what was community for aws? And how many years ago was that?

Jason Dunn:
Yeah, well, big question. So I’ll give you the best answer I can. So back in late, late 2019, so before I arrived, AWS essentially had two, you know, community programs. They had the Heroes program, which I don’t know how many heroes they had at the time, maybe 100 or one. But that was like a nomination program, like super VIP, you know, you couldn’t apply to get in, you just had to do big things in the community. They also had a user groups program, you know, where someone who wanted to lead a local user group could. But if you were sort of a developer that, you know, you were really into aws, you love, you know, learning new things and you love, you know, telling people about aws. Neither one of these programs was really like a fit for you.

Jason Dunn:
So my at the time coworker, Ross Barrett, who was my manager for many years and a great, great community guy, he’s the one that wrote the doc. So as most people know on Amazon, everything we do is based on a doc. And so he wrote, you know, a doc that said, hey, we need this new community program and we need a headcount and here’s what it’s going to do. And at the time it was called the Explorers program. That was like the internal code word. He got the go ahead and then fast forward a few months. I got hired in March of 2020 to build the program. The basic idea of the program was we wanted something that could be big, global and that people could apply to join, you know, so a net new program that neither of the pre existing programs could fill the void for.

Jason Dunn:
And that’s what I was brought on board to build.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And you said there, we’ll talk about it later. But you said there apply to join. So this wasn’t just like self sign up everybody, let’s just try to juice the numbers.

Jason Dunn:
Yeah, I think anyone who’s building a community, you know, has to decide early on. In fact, it’s probably like a day zero, you know, decision. Is this a community for everyone or is it a community for certain people? You know, is it a community for all of our customers or is it a community for like a slice of our customers that line up with certain things that we’re looking for and then we’re going to give them certain things? That’s a day zero, you know, decision that someone has to make. And it’s obviously going to have a massive influence on the direction of their community, the size of the community, the resources required, everything.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What were you looking for in your community members?

Jason Dunn:
Yeah, so we were specifically looking for people that had, I sort of call it a teacher or mentor type mentality. They’re people that love exploring new things, they love learning new things, but they also have the desire to share that with other people. So these are the people that, you know, a new AWS service would come out, they would get their hands on it, they play with it, and then they’d rush out to like write a blog post and say, hey, there’s this new thing. I can do this with it. I ran into this sharp edge. Here’s how you work around it. So those type of people that enjoy sharing with other people, that was the bullseye of the developers that we were trying to reach in the community and are really our ideal community member. Fit that mold.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. You told me previously that you guys went from around 200 folks in the beta to ultimately, when you left recently, around 3,600 members across over 110 countries. Yeah, that’s. That’s phenomenal. I mean, that’s, that’s obviously orders of magnitude and growth. Um, yeah, go ahead.

Jason Dunn:
Well, I was gonna say. So it’s interesting, right? So we, when we first started the program, we had a really tight relationship with the AWS service teams. And in fact, one of the, One of the reasons for the program was the service teams wanted to be able to. To sort of like pick and say, hey, we have these, like great advocates out there. You know, they’re talking about databases or lambda or machine learning, you know, services back then. We know who these people are and we want a program where we can engage with them. So kind of, you know, V1 or in early the beta V05 was actually me taking these 200 or so folks that the service teams had identified and sort of bringing them into the community. Once we had that kind of baseline and again, you know, they.

Jason Dunn:
So. So the first. The first people, to be clear, they actually didn’t have to apply, they were actually invited. So that was kind of like our seed. And I think that that’s, that’s an important thing that a new community can do. If they identify customers out there that just really seem into the product and love giving feedback and engaging. Even if down the road you want to have kind of an application only community, if you find the right people, they’re the ones that are getting past the velvet rope right away. You’re inviting them and saying, hey, you are exactly who we want.

Jason Dunn:
And those people will actually set the baseline for how your community will function and how people will relate within the community. So in a lot of ways, picking the first people in the community is also a really critical thing that people need to. Need to think about.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Is it fair to say, I mean, I don’t know what your purview’s been to other communities, but is it fair to say that maybe people just keep the gates too open too wide, too early with community members?

Jason Dunn:
I mean, it really depends what kind of a community you’re trying to build, you know, so some communities function incredibly well at a very, you know, small scale. So the AWS Heroes program, for example, I mean, today I think it’s about 250 people. The goal with a program like that is to keep it, you know, super vip, really high bar. The right people are nominated. And they also have a process by which to kind of exit people out. So if someone joins and then they just kind of go mia they won’t be renewed again. And they do that every two years. So I think any community, if you’re trying to build a community that you don’t want to just be open to the general public, you have to, number one, be really clear about who you’re looking for.

Jason Dunn:
You also have to be clear about what the sort of requirements are. I think the most difficult kind of community would be one where you can’t get in and you don’t know why you can’t get in, you know, so you want to. You want to be clear about that. So for the Community Builders program, we were very, you know, forthright. We said, hey, we’re looking for people that share knowledge about AWS. And it could be a blog post, a YouTube video, you know, whatever it might be. And so that’s the requirement. And then we will evaluate applications, you know, based on that.

Jason Dunn:
And you kind of hinted at this before, but, you know, you can have a community with thousands of people. I mean, early on, you know, we made the decision to not go that route. But, you know, if you’re doing a community and you just want it to be really big, really fast, then, yeah, you can accept everyone in and call it a community, and you might have 10 or 20,000 people fast. But then you got to ask yourself, is that really a community? Or did I just build a marketing channel? You know, do I just have a big group of people that I can market to? But it’s so big, they don’t ever actually get to know each other, and you can’t really build relationships. And so I think that’s one thing people sometimes get a little confused about, especially when they say, you know, hey, it’s a community manager. And I saw, I saw a job posting today. It was a community manager job. And then the job listing was like, our social media channels.

Jason Dunn:
And, you know, social media and community are not always the same thing. Sometimes they can be. You can definitely have a thriving, you know, slice of community in public, on social media channels, but sometimes people put them all in the same bucket and they shouldn’t.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Right. It just becomes an internal social media platform at the end of the day. What is LinkedIn? What is Facebook? It’s groups, it’s forums, it’s feeds. Right. So it’s really just a smaller version of that if you treat it that way, if you choose to treat it that way. So you’re looking for the right Persona for this community. You want them ultimately to become advocates or strengthen their advocacy and take actions as output in a form of advocacy. You want them to network and engage with each other.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You want them to communicate in like a forum or community type of platform. What other types of goals did the program have as far as, you know, high value? How did you define what a high value activity was for a community member and what the mission would be for each person?

Jason Dunn:
Yeah, I mean, ultimately we wanted to have, you know, in Amazon terms, you know, like a bar, you know, so we want to have like a standard. Once somebody kind of hit that bar of having in the application, we asked for two things, two examples kind of in the previous 12 months, once someone was in the program, in order to remain in the program, we actually just asked for the same thing. So someone joins 12 months later when they’re up for renewal. We just sort of say, hey, in the preceding 12 months, what have you done that essentially teaches other people about AWS that could take any form. And we have people doing podcasts, presenting at conferences, getting up in front of a user group and giving a talk, videos, blogs, et cetera. So we didn’t, we didn’t have any, any goals around sort of like where they presented, but we were always keen to, like, celebrate great content that these folks would, would create. And then there was also, you know, there, there were things that I would consider you to high value outputs or things that, you know, go above and beyond. Where community members did something really cool is a lot of our community members around the world will do what we call AWS Community days quite often.

Jason Dunn:
These are done by user group leaders and sometimes AWS heroes and community builders. And so it’s a community day that they organize and they get. And it’s a live in person event. Usually, you know, one, one or two days where everyone gets together and they get to learn from each other. I actually had a community builder in South Korea do just this past January, the world’s first Community Builder day. So this guy and the other community builders in South Korea were just so excited about being in the program and so excited to share their knowledge with other people, they just decided to call their day a Community Builder day, which I just, I loved. Sadly, I couldn’t make it to Korea, but it was, it was a great, great opportunity for them to do things in the local market. That’s the thing too.

Jason Dunn:
We really emphasize community members reaching out to their own, their own community in whatever way works best for them. You know, there’s, you know, there’s a prevalence for a lot of developer content to be in English. We really emphasize like local language content and using whatever platforms or, you know, mediums they needed to do in order to help other folks learn about aws.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, yeah. Jason, how do you define the metrics of success for community? They were doing all these great things. How did you roll this up into something that you could report and who did you report it up to?

Jason Dunn:
Yeah, so one of the toughest things about community is how do you measure success? Right. What does measuring look like? I think one of the reasons why this is so tough and anyone who works in community will tell you, like, this is just a hard thing to do because fundamentally a great community is based on relationships. And so if I were to ask you, how do you measure the metrics of the relationship with, you know, your spouse or partner, you’d be like, well, I don’t really have metrics, you know. You know, I just, I know whether it’s good or whether it’s bad, you know, like whether it’s working or whether it isn’t. So when it comes to measuring, it’s a vibe. Yeah, yeah, sure, yeah, yeah. The word of 2026. Right? It’s, it’s a vibe.

Jason Dunn:
There’s a lot of different ways you could, you can measure it, you know, you can look at activity levels in the community, you know, meaning how often are people coming back and how often are they engaging with the things that we’re doing. But I think when it comes to reporting, up to, you know, senior leadership coming to them and saying, hey, you know, every month, 80% of our community comes back every, you know, 30 days. Well, a community manager would deeply care about that metric, but a leadership might, a leader might just go, well, so what, like what does that actually mean? So I think the key thing is actually to try to get a grasp on the output, right, because leaders care about, you know, what are they doing to help drive the organization’s goals. So on our side, you know, on the developer experience team at aws, a lot of our goals were around essentially influencing developers. Are they learning, are they growing, are they trying out new AWS technologies? And then are they taking those technologies into their organizations and their businesses? Ultimately we worked in marketing. So marketing’s job is to promote and get people using the stuff. So one of the things we would measure would actually be the output and the reach. So there’s a great cloud developers website called Dev To.

Jason Dunn:
It’s kind of like if medium, but only for cloud developers. And early on, I think it was in 2021, we created, actually a community member created a dev organization for community builders. And then I eventually kind of adopted it. Once we had kind of a platform and a place for that content, we heavily emphasized, you know, hey, you can publish your content wherever you want, but we have this great body of work and this great, you know, gravitational pull. And at least last time I was, I checked, we had the single biggest organization on dev. I think there were, you know, three, four thousand people. Because if somebody doesn’t renew as a community builder, we didn’t like remove them from the organization. We kind of kept their body of content and so it grew to just be this great mass content.

Jason Dunn:
And then you can measure things like page views and time on page and so you actually look and say, okay, our community every year is doing, let’s say it’s three or four thousand pieces of content about aws. And we can point to metrics that say there were 300,000 views of that content. And that’s not dissimilar, frankly to how a lot of, even developer advocates or folks that work on marketing teams, they create content, they’re going to measure the impact of that content based on views and, you know, bounce rates and things like that. So yeah, if you can do that with community, it’s great. But honestly, that was only a tiny slice of everything else the community was doing. And that’s why we had something called the Content Reporting tool, which I can, I can talk about a little bit, but it’s essentially just asking customers what they’re doing. So I think the most important thing for A person running a community is figure out what metrics matter to your leadership and then figure out what you can do to kind of communicate your success. But still do it in a really authentic way.

Jason Dunn:
Because nobody wants to be a part of a community where you’re being asked to use like affiliate tracking links or something creepy every time you talk about a product. Nobody, nobody would sign up for that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Tell me about the content, what was it? Content.

Jason Dunn:
Content reporting tool. Yes, the crt. We just, we kind of needed to give it a name. One of the things in community can be kind of tricky is people running the community. You know, they know people out there doing stuff and it could feel a little bit weird if you say like, well, you know, we want to know what you’re doing. Especially if you know, you know, you’re a big company like Amazon, you can come across as a little off putting. So we sort of did this test. We just created this tool, simple online login.

Jason Dunn:
And we said, hey, we would love to know the awesome stuff that you’re doing. Like we know you’re presenting at conferences, you’re doing videos, doing all this other stuff. We just want to know about it so we can help celebrate with you. And we just created this simple little tool and it was a bit of a proof of concept. Like we didn’t know would community members want to tell us this or would they just kind of go, ah, buzz off big, you know, big corporation, I’m going to do my own thing. It was a raging success. So the tool was maybe it’s been around for maybe four, four and a half years at this point. And we have over 25,000 things that had been submitted.

Jason Dunn:
Open source contributions, videos. Like every time a community builder did something, a lot of them would come to the tool and tell us because they wanted to kind of celebrate with us and they just wanted to show us like, hey, I did this cool thing, I want to tell you about it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So pause right there. How do they want to celebrate you? I’m trying to figure out what the true motivation because that’s extra work for them. I mean we can’t even get our sellers and neither can any company sellers to go and update Salesforce, right? So like how are we getting community builders for a different company to go in there and tell you what they just did? Like either they’re just like truly fanatical fans, raving lunatic, lunatical whatever fans, or they’re getting 50 bucks a pop for every time they update your CRM with what they’ve done. I mean what’s the incentive that they had?

Jason Dunn:
Yeah, yeah. Well, so I think. I think, you know, the first thing is when we talk about, you know, establishing why the community exists and establishing, you know, the vibe, the reason for being. If you build up right from ground zero, something that celebrates learning and achievement and sharing with others, when you extend that into, hey, we just. We want you to tell us about the cool stuff you’re doing. They genuinely want to do that. So I think if you build it in the right way, you can actually get a lot of voluntary, you know, participation. I want to be super clear too.

Jason Dunn:
The easier you make it, the more participation you will be. So this was like a simple form. They could probably fill it out on like 30 seconds and they were done.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Sure.

Jason Dunn:
So I think that that’s part of it, but then the other part of it too, is you also want to celebrate that. So every Friday, I would do these Friday announcements, and in the Friday announcement, in partnership with one of my co workers, Corey, would go in and find great content that people had submitted, and he would look at it and kind of say, yeah, this is amazing content that’s really useful to the community. And every Friday I would celebrate it and give away some points that they could use for swag. So when you start celebrating the good things that are happening in the community, other people see that and say, oh, you know, Susan did this great video that talks about this. I want to be like, Susan, I want swag points. I want to be celebrated in front of thousands of my peers. So you start to get. So it’s gamification, but like with a lowercase G.

Jason Dunn:
Right. There is a reward there, but it’s not hoop jumping. It’s not asking the customers to like, you know, do these 10 things and get a. Get a prize at the end. I think of it as sort of incentivization that encourages the kind of behavior that you want to have in your community. And that is just like a flywheel that just sort of builds upon itself. And eventually you have a lot of people that are doing the thing you want them to do is like a, you know, a marketing person as a person leading the community, but they’re also getting benefit from it themselves. And I think that’s a key thing with any community, is just mutual benefit.

Jason Dunn:
Are both people getting something out of it?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. And it’s. Whether it’s intrinsic or extrinsic value, it needs to serve both parties.

Jason Dunn:
Yeah, there’s definitely both are needed.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, yeah. The golden jacket. I know Salesforce has a Big program that they’re known for with their golden hoodie. Maybe. Tell us about the Golden Jacket at aws. I know you mentioned a second ago that you could accrue points and spend them towards swag. I want to know everything that you did with the Golden Jacket.

Jason Dunn:
Sure, yeah. I love telling this story. So the AWS training and certification team, the folks that do all the certifications and learning and everything, years ago, I don’t even know who it was. Someone started this sort of thing where they’re like, oh, you know, if you get all your certifications, I think at the time there might have been 10. I think now there’s maybe 14. But basically, if you get all your certifications, which I don’t know what the number is, but I mean, I have to think it’s a couple hundred hours of studying and doing the actual exams like it is. It is a big, big investment that most people will take, you know, years to actually accomplish. If you get all your certifications, you’ll get this golden Jacket.

Jason Dunn:
So this. This is going back, you know, easily six, seven years, if not more. But it was a very, like, kind of a skunk works program. Like, there was no official way to get one. There was no website you could go to. And a lot of people got their Golden Jacket just from, like, AWS partners. And so if you were an AWS partner and you were living and breathing, AWS got certified, then maybe someone to AWS would get you a golden jacket. Well, when I started the Community Builders program, we had community builders, you know, people, developers in the community that had all their certifications.

Jason Dunn:
And they would come to me at AWS and say, hey, how do I get a Golden jacket? Like, I know I’ve done all the studying, I’ve done all the work. Where do I get the golden jacket? And I would just have to shrug my shoulders and say, I have no idea. You know, So I do all this internal research, and everything came back to. It was an unofficial program, and nobody knew how. How to do it because you just had to kind of know, like, the right person. Well, being in community, I eventually just got fed up with that. I was like, no, this is, like, not acceptable. I have a swag vendor that I work with.

Jason Dunn:
We can order Golden Jackets and we can verify who passed all their certifications. And so within just. I don’t. It probably was maybe a couple weeks of work. I made the right connections internally with someone in the training and certification team that would validate to make sure that this person really qualified for it. We just spun up a golden jacket, you know, claim program. And the response was overwhelming. I want to say in the first, we did a quarterly kind of every 90 days.

Jason Dunn:
I think in the first quarter we had something like 130 or 140 people request golden jackets because there was this like pent up demand of these aws, you know, developers who had done all the work and they had all the expertise, but AWS didn’t give them an opportunity to kind of, you know, cash in on that in a way that, and again, it’s a golden jacket. It’s pretty gaudy, it’s pretty tacky. But boy, when you wear that at a conference, you’re saying to everyone there, man, I know my stuff, you know, I know about aws. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So that was one of those things that I was really happy to do. And I think as an example of, you know, if the company can’t serve your customers in the right way and you have the ability to put something together to help them out, you should do that. And not everyone in the community obviously qualified for the getjacket. It was just a small percentage, but it helped excite the whole community and it got dozens and dozens of people to finish their certifications because now they actually had a goal.

Jason Dunn:
They had something that said, oh, if I finish my certs, I too can get a golden jacket. And so that helps, you know, training and certification helps aws.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. Community managers are always fighting for budget. They’re never top of the call sheet when it comes to that. I don’t believe you guys were using our gainsights community platform, our product, but I do, for the value of our audience, want to understand what was in your toolkit. So tell me a little bit about the tools that you use to bring this to life.

Jason Dunn:
Yeah, agreed with you on budget. You know, community managers, I think there’s sometimes there’s a lot of confusion about what community managers need. And because we tend to be pretty big hearted people that are used to being scrappy, sometimes we don’t ask, you know, we just say, oh, you know, I’ll figure it out, figure it out. And so when I started, you know, honestly, my toolkit consisted of basically, you know, these two hands like that. That was my, my toolkit. Right. We had nothing. There was no platform.

Jason Dunn:
So for the first year, and even for the first couple years, probably the first three years, it was a free Slack workspace, Free tier, Slack workspace and a spreadsheet. And that is my platform.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Everything to communicate with your, with your customers. With the community members.

Jason Dunn:
And everything we did was actually in because we couldn’t do email. So there’s this, you know, there’s this big divide. And you know, you mentioned Salesforce earlier, right? There’s this interesting divide when you think about customers and community. You know, some companies would look at a community and say, well, these are our customers. So we’re just going to, you know, shove them into our Salesforce CRM and they’re going to get the pipeline of all of our communications and marketing. Well, developers are kind of allergic to sales and marketing, right? And so if you’re building a community for developers, you want to be really careful to not take the email address that they gave you for the community program and sign them up for, you know, the fire hose of digital marketing. So we actually kept everything very firewalled off and we had to do incredibly old school things like Outlook mail merges. You know, anyone that knows how to do that? I mean, you know, this is like technology.

Jason Dunn:
It’s like 25 years old. I became a black belt in doing Outlook mail merges because we had no other way to email our customers. All of our tools were these, that they were meant for emailing millions. And this, you know, insiders, you know, kind of, it’s the reality of things. At Amazon, we had tools to email 10 million people and we had tools to email one person like Outlook. There wasn’t anything in the middle. So you have to get scrappy and inventive and then, yeah, you do. You do things like, like mail merge.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
That’s so funny. Okay, last tip here. If you’re advising a young upstart in their community professional career, they’re just maybe into their first role as a community manager.

Jason Dunn:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What’s some advice that you’d give them?

Jason Dunn:
I think the biggest thing is that we live in this very interesting time with AI and Vibe coding tools to the point where whatever I’m going to do in my next job will be very different in a lot of ways than what I did in my last job. Because at my AWS job in January of 2026, that was the first time I actually had a tool available to me internally at Amazon that I could actually create something with. I Vibe coded a browser extension because I needed it to do something on this web page and I used it to build something. And that was like a, you know, light bulb moment for me. We didn’t, you know, internally at Amazon, we don’t have access to things like, you know, Claude and, you know, chatgpt. So that was really interesting. And I think right now there is this opportunity for someone getting started to actually build interesting things, useful things that no community manager in history has ever had access to. You know, we would have to go to, you know, buy platforms, you know, subscribe to things, and there’s procurement and there’s all this other stuff.

Jason Dunn:
But now you can actually build things that will help you serve your customers better. The temptation, though, is to lean on those tools to be, like, the real reason why you’re doing community. And I guess I would just say that no matter what tools you’re using, a good community is going to be based on humanity. It’s going to be people connecting with other people. And my warning would be to not fall in love with the tools and the technology at the cost of the humanity of your community, because that way lies an automated marketing channel that no one will care about. And so you really have to keep the humanity part. And that might mean, you know, some grunt work and some extra, you know, things you have to do, but community will always be about people connecting with each other. And I think it’s important to never forget that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, I love. Let’s end there. Humans connecting with humans. Humanity connecting with humanity. Let’s never forget that. Jason Dunn, former principal developer, Community program manager at Amazon Web Services aws, thank you so much for being on the program.

Jason Dunn:
Thank you, Josh. It was an absolute pleasure. As you can tell, I love talking about this stuff. Thank you.