Buildergroop, counted
I started Buildergroop in November 2021 with Aaryaman and Tejas: an online home for Gen Z developers, designers and builders. Within a year it had thousands of members, hackathons with $10k+ in prizes, and a chat room that never went quiet — plus Aaryaman, Tejas and I became the first minors to incorporate a Delaware C-Corp with Stripe.
By May 2023 we decided to move on for various personal reasons. This is every message from the two years Buildergroop was running and the seven months after — 1,120,067 messages from 7,285 people.
The arc
February 2022 was the top: 111,150 messages from 1,272 people. The dotted line is May 2023, when we stopped. The twelve months before it averaged 50,963 messages a month; the seven after, 15,140.
Who did the talking
The top band is almost too thin to see: 7 people — one in a thousand — wrote 27% of everything. Widen it to the top 1% and 73 people account for 80%. The other 6,557, including 3,570 who said exactly one thing, wrote the remaining 2%.
Lifespans
Almost everyone who made the largest contributions to the community arrived in its first ninety days. Bar opacity is message volume. The bars that reach the right edge are the people who were still there at the end of 2023, seven months after we had moved on.
Who talked to who
Node size is how much someone wrote; line weight is how much two people wrote to each other. There isn't a hub-and-spoke around the founders — it's a dense knot of a dozen people who all talked to all of each other, with a second generation loosely attached to the side.
Six friendships, by the month
Six friendships, traced through who replied to whom. Each strip is one pair; each bar is a month of replies between them.
Almost every friendship here has the same shape: it starts in the first months, burns hottest in 2022, and tapers. Most of these friendships migrated to iMessage or DMs; they didn't die with the community.
In their words
We kept a “wall of love” of what members and guests said about it on Twitter. A few of them, as posted.
“.@buildergroop is an antidote to cynicism. when you see the projects that those members are working on- you know the kids are alright”
Angelo 🇵🇷 · @ngeloxyz“congrats to the @buildergroop team for sharing this resource with the world ! thrilled to see ppl like @aridutilh working to expand access to info + opportunities for young ppl interested in careers in tech 💚🪐 was an honor to contribute on behalf of @landing__space ! 🫶”
liz friedland · @liz_friedland“Things I've learned so far in BuilderHacks by @buildergroop · How to use Electron· How to communicate between different processes in an app· How to use an iframe· How to use How to use `useRef()` in React+ a lot more! Hackathons are the best.”
Neesh 🥭 · @Neesh774“I just listened to the talk @buildergroop with @leeerob So much to learn from this community.”
Josias Aurel ⚡ · @JosiasWing“One hack of a hackathon @buildergroop Love every bit and those projects just blown my mind.Me didn't make it to finals but learn something new today. It feels soooo good 😄And now me and legend @saviomartin7 are discord friends "yeh I can brag about it LOL"love u savio”
Anish · @itsanishjain“I got to see this madness in action earlier today. This and a ton of amazing work is being produced by members of @buildergroop Glad I’m part of the community and I look forward to what’s to come next ❤️”
Andrew Bellucci · @AndrewBellucci“thanks @buildergroop for having me…and my dad”
Jamie Pine · @jamiepine“quick shoutout to @buildergroop members for always hyping up + repping my wallpapers. can't express how much it means”
conrad · @notcnrad“I am also working on a startup and also got that opportunity through @buildergroop only. Buildergroop is the best thing that happened to me after learning to code 💖”
Avichal · @neweradeveloper“You might want to check out @buildergroop People are pretty active there, with fireside chats happening almost weekly.”
dylan · @dhrtzg“Yesterday I was scouted from @buildergroop for @Slingshotahead by the CEO herself, so excited to be in another Gen-Z community”
Avichal · @neweradeveloper“"we need more communities like this for the next generation of builders" - @charlesvien on @buildergroop”
ari dutilh · @aridutilh“Amazed by the community @buildergroop”
Varun Potti · @PottiVarun13 of the 29 posts on the original Wall of Love; each card links to the tweet.
Every single day
Someone said something on 749 of 765 days. The darkest square is February 5, 2022, with 10,654 messages — more than the whole of December 2023.
When a global server is awake
Peak is 12pm Eastern — lunchtime in America, 9am in San Francisco, past 9pm in India: the one hour when both halves of the server are free at once. The quietest hour is 4am Eastern, the middle of the night on one side of the world and the middle of the school day on the other. Sundays are the busiest day.
The inbox
Who gets pulled into conversations. Replies are people answering you; mentions are people summoning you.
The welcome rate
In the first month, 89% of newcomers got a direct reply to a message of theirs in their first 24hrs. Once the server was big enough that a stranger's first message could scroll past unanswered, that fell to about a fifth — and here's the part I didn't expect: it didn't move when we stopped in May 2023. The regulars kept welcoming strangers without us, at the same rate, through the end of the year. If I had to pick one number that predicts whether a community lives, it's this one.
Room temperature
For all of 2022 the typical gap was 6s, a live conversation, all day. It held through the summer we left, then doubled by December 2023: 16s. Still a live room, but the first sign of the slowing that would follow.
Who stayed
The people who were there in the first three months stuck around at twice the rate of anyone who came later — a year on, 11% of them were still posting versus 3% for the rest of 2022. (The 2023 cohort's curve is cut short by the end of the data.) Being early wasn't just a badge, it was where most of the friendships mentioned above came from.
What we talked about
Mentions per 1,000 messages, by quarter. Quarters with fewer than 10,000 messages are left out.
Web3 talk peaked in early 2022 and never came back. Rust had a moment. “AI” went from background noise to the biggest subject in exactly the quarter ChatGPT shipped, and was still climbing when the data ends.
The loudest 24 hours
It didn't come out of nowhere: the 24 hours before this window already had 4,489 messages, about double a normal day. Then, from 4am that Saturday, 11,616 messages from 287 people — building all day and peaking at 2,000 between 8pm and 9pm, 33 a minute for an hour straight. 22% were direct replies. The five loudest people that day wrote 3,088 of them.
Who they were
From the roles people picked themselves on joining. Only about a fifth filled anything in, so read these as a sample.
Fine print
Built from an export from a community analytics bot. 1,131,948 messages including bots, 1,120,067 without — November 27, 2021 through December 31, 2023, two years of running it and seven months after. The server is still open; later messages exist but aren't shown here. Some of the intro is adapted from the original About us page. Private and moderator channels are not included. Times are US Eastern. Usernames are public Discord handles. Discord folds every since-deleted account into one placeholder author — 78,722 messages here — so those count toward totals but are left out of every per-person statistic.