Taylor Desseyn outlines a three-part strategy to build the world's largest online technical community: growing torc.dev from 90,000 users, creating content, and launching a talent marketplace. He's hired Brianna Holmes and Jason Torres to lead marketing and community building, and will document the effort in a new podcast called Guidance Counselor 2.0.
Chapters
Excited to build this thing in public. I think it's gonna be exciting. Hopefully, hopefully it's exciting. If it's not exciting, you're not gonna watch it.
Finally got the official offer, um, for Torque/Ronstadt. Pretty, pretty excited about it. After honestly 2 months, they finally came in. Really starting to set in kind of things to do right now, figuring out the To be honest with you, we have so much we have to do. It's like, how do you engage?
Like we talk about community.
It's like, what does that look like? Like for me, community is really, it's the three-prong approach on our team, right? We have the platform side. So our platform is essentially torc.dev.
Pretty sure it's right.
T-O-R-C.dev. Well, what are we doing to engage the platform, right?
We have 90,000 people on our platform.
So it's like, we set email alert, we set up WhatsApp text, right? Talking about a lot of telecom stuff. I haven't recruited telecom in years down in Latin America, you know, Cisco, Some Verizon stuff in the US. So, you know, it's like, so you think about this stuff like, all right, well, how do you, you know, I'm thinking about my traditional way of recruiting, right? Which is like just running searches. But now it's like, okay, well, let's, let's maybe like run a meaningful ad, right? You know, and what does that look like? Like, I'm still trying to figure that out. It's a fascinating problem to be like, all right, we need these type of people in Colombia and Bolivia. Go do something, right? It really truly is like, what does content look like at scale? So I'm really looking forward to diving into this. And I really think like what we're doing Is very difficult to solve, but I really truly think it is the future of like this entire industry, right? To do talent marketplaces, especially my experience now, like you need scale. I don't think you can have a talent marketplace with like four thousand developers on your platform. Like you need hundreds of thousands of people because there's different nuances of skills, right?
Just crazy.
Really starting to get into it now.
Never honey come back. Sometime I'm gonna wrap that dust. Sometime I get a hump in my back. Sometime I'm going over here. Sometime—
A lot of companies want to build community, but they all just sit behind their keyboards and talk about community. Building community, you got to spend money and you got to spend a fair amount of money. But I promise you, like, it's basically like a snowball or tidal wave situation where if you can get over the hump as a business to like spending the money probably for the first year, it then just starts to snowball on itself and you can pull back a little bit. But it is a huge effort to kind of get things going. So we're going to be attacking— I don't know if I've said this already, but we're going to be attacking it kind of on all different angles. My platform and kind of what I've been thinking, everything TDestiny is just going to be about documenting what I'm doing, what I'm— who I'm meeting, conversations I'm having, building the platform, and just really building the Torque platform. Torque is going to be more about giving back with content, helping people find jobs, etc., etc. So We're gonna be moving Guidance Counselor 2.0, that's gonna be the Torque flagship podcast, and we're gonna develop meaningful information around that.
So excited for the future of content. You were talking about short form versus long form.
Like, you know, over the 4 years we've been spinning around so much stuff and it's like more interactive short form and like crazier graphics and we gotta look like this.
And like now it's It's like, man, picking—
like, just opening up your phone or opening up the camera and just like having an authentic message is more than anything else.
They're like 8:20 AM. Yeah.
My name is Taylor Desseyn. I am VP of Global Community at Torque.
It's been a minute. It is October 1st. I don't even— I think I haven't done one of these vlogs in like a week now at this point. Happened. I offered a spot to Jason Torres and Brianna Holmes. For those of you who do not know Brianna Holmes, she is one of the main forces in helping scale Render ATL, one of the largest conferences in the US. She's the brains behind the marketing of it. I know my strength is staffing and content and marketing at a high level, and I know the way it's supposed to look, but I need someone to come in and implement it. And so Brianna is doing that for me. Jason, this is his first job in tech. Jason has built an incredible community of 4,000 He threw a conference that raised $15,000 or $10,000 to $15,000 for a friend whose wife has cancer over a weekend. Have you thrown a virtual conference that raised that much money? I haven't. Nobody has. So I had to get him, again, a guy that really understands community and content. And basically everybody we're hiring from here on out has to understand content, has to understand community. I'm gonna be documenting building the community and the platform at a very high level. Brianna's gonna talk about the things we've implemented in marketing.
Jason's gonna be talking about what he's doing in like different verticals.
different parts of the world.
So again, very excited about this. Incredibly excited.
