Max Levchin on (Social Network) Platform Evangelism

Max Levchin is blogging, which is great! My friends are sick of me telling them to read the transcript of his 2005 Bob Cringely interview (or watch the video) and now I can tell them to read his blog.

Like Marc Andreessen before him, Max is strong out of the gate with a terrific post—putatively about social networks but actually about evangelizing any platform to developers: How to successfully launch a social networking development platform.

Go read the whole thing, but here are the bullet points (mostly for my future reference):

1. Create a feeling of technological openness
2. Treat developers equally, but leverage the best ones by letting them closer in
3. Plan and manage a community, and introduce a community manager early
4. Shift the support/documentation load onto the early developers
5. Respond very quickly to platform issues, and take the early scaling problems seriously
6. Emphasize the money-making nature of the platform
7. Make your campus a place that developers very much want to visit
8. Pre- and over-communicate policy changes and make major changes with at least the perception of open debate
9. Make the #1 measurable goal of your PR team the amount of coverage that successful (or just interesting) developers get
10. Hold frequent developer events and invite leading developers to speak at those

There's a reason Max is as successful as he is: he's a really bright guy. And upon reflection, it's certainly significant that to Max, "platform" is functionally equivalent to "social networking platform", as in, "Are there still any other kinds of platforms?"