Jon Gottfried recounts the founding story of Major League Hacking (MLH), from its origins in connecting university hackathon communities to becoming a platform that has reached over one million developers. He discusses pivotal moments like landing Dell as their first major sponsor and explains why word-of-mouth marketing outperformed paid acquisition for their developer audience. Jon reveals their intentional strategy of using branded merchandise as identity markers and demonstrates how initially unscalable personal connections evolved into systematic community-building processes. Throughout the conversation, Jon emphasizes that measuring impact through changed lives has been far more meaningful than tracking vanity metrics, offering valuable insights for anyone building developer communities. Developer Marketing Stories is brought to you by Developer Marketing in Practice, the training and coaching program that helps you level-up your developer marketing career. https://developer.marketing