Ruminating on the overly demystified line “if you build it, they’ll come”. I realize that it could serve as a no-brainer when applied to Open source, yeah? Considering that it’s developing a product/software and opening it up to the world – and if it’s opened up to be used for free by anyone, then it should easily sell itself.
I mean if you heard that something was free, then naturally you should see a crowd gathered over it, get interested in it and want to take it out for a spin.
Well, there’s the first ‘hearing about it’ part.
Then there’s the scenario where there isn’t just one free or open product. What if you had multiple opened-up products? How do you make the one you are selling stand out from the rest?
There are two ways to think about marketing in this environment:
1) That the idea of the software being open source is the marketing strategy in itself.
2) That you have built this software to be open, and you need the audience. The way you’d traditionally think about marketing.
Open source as Marketing
See what I did there? Open source as Marketing…? Okay, just kidding. Back to the matter.
Open source as Marketing strategy depicts that you open up the source code of your software, for collaborators, contributors, etc, for them to be part of the building process, build a community around the project, and help the community (which has been created around it) get the best out of using the tool/software, help the community learn to personalize the software for their own use-case and scenarios.
Neha Narkhede describes this well when she said “First, open source isn’t a business model; it is a go-to-market strategy. Done right, it really solves one of the hardest problems in building a business — getting traction for the product. Focusing on developer evangelism and community building is key to adoption of open-source technology.“
Marketing your open source project(s)
Marketing is crucial to the success of your open source project. As there are so many open source projects competing for the same set of audience’s attention, it becomes essential to plan for optimal marketing, to attract contributors, find users, showcase the value, and raise the profile of your project.
However, marketing for open source software, especially commercial ones, may not take the same traditional marketing route that we are accustomed to, as product education is really a better marketing approach to ‘selling’ open source software.
As Jakub Czakon, CMO of neptune.ai, says, “Developers DO NOT want to be persuaded. They want to be educated, enabled, and inspired.” You’ll therefore want to craft your marketing strategy around this, knowing fully well that your target audience consists people (read Devs) who want to work on and be associated with projects that others find valuable.
In this article on Opensource.com, Scott McCarty uses Kubernetes to portray how marketing should be defined when thinking about open source:
“For example, Kubernetes is a great technology and a great upstream project. Any customer interested in running containers at scale is probably aware of this technology. However, some customers are looking for a very general-purpose, hosted solution where somebody else runs it for them. Other potential customers are interested in building a highly customized solution on-premise with tight security controls. These two buyers are buying for different reasons.”
Marketing your open source project should, therefore, be approached from a very intentional, education-laced, authentic, strategic PoV.
What are your thoughts on marketing open source projects?
This is an ongoing thought process. I’ll update as my thought processes information and new knowledge. 😉
