‍Building a platform ecosystem can be a great way to build community and energy around what you’re doing. Three best practices I’ve learned from software developer platforms are as follows. These aren’t the only things to focus on of course, but I do like these three tactics.

(1) Provide some free level of access that people can immediately begin experimenting with at any hour day or night (Mashery taught me that before they were acquired by Intel).

(2) Make sure you tell people what types of functionality you want them to build on your platform and what types of things you intend to build yourself, even thematically (Several years ago Twitter published the quadrant diagram below and told its ecosystem which of those quadrants it wanted outside developers to focus on and which ones to avoid. The upper right was one to stay away from, they said.)

(3) If you can, it’s great to offer a high-touch preview of your roadmap. Salesforce regularly does a registration-required live video walk-through of what they’ve got coming over the next months.

Those are some of my favorite tactics. Anyone have anything else you’d like to add?