
Why your open source project needs marketing help - ashitlerferad
https://opensource.com/business/16/8/if-you-build-it-they-wont-come
======
CiPHPerCoder
Hmm, I wonder if there'd be any value in a monthly whoishiring-esque thread
for open source projects?

~~~
buovjaga
I think this is a good idea. Should it also include tenders for contractor
work? There have been a ton of those for LibreOffice:
[https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/category/tenders/](https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/category/tenders/)

I also just learned that there are a bunch of positions open for Blender right
now: [https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-
committers/2016-Augus...](https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-
committers/2016-August/047589.html)

~~~
vmorgulis
I would add money in the pipe with potential sponsors.

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noveltymechanic
In my experience it's been difficult to convince dev's about the whole
"product/market fit" growth hack mentality. I noticed you said that you think
product is more important than marketing. Could you expand a bit on how you at
Augur, are finding the balance? Your example with the video was great and Im
glad it worked out well.

~~~
tonyswish
In regards to your first statement, I have to share that I'm not a huge fan of
the TERM "growth hacking", in fact I've grown to loathe it quite a bit. It
comes across as a way to make marketing/growth strategies used by businesses
for centuries seem more complicated and more difficult than they really are.
Somehow that phrase represents (especially to startups) a mentality that
"getting new customers at the lowest cost possible" is some revolutionary goal
that was just realized when the Internet made it easier to reach out to
specific targets.

Whenever I browse on AngelList, every single startup looks for the same things
in their marketing hires. How so few seem to understand that they are a
startup and many of the things they think "should be done" are most likely not
appropriate for where they are as a company. It creates a situation analogous
to a very large conference with hundreds of startups vying for any sort of
media or investor attention. By doing what everyone else is doing, because of
everyone else is doing it. Most startup marketers around int he past few years
would benefit greatly for a few years marketing a physical good (or working in
retail), the reason for that is part of my answer to your next question....

The reason I'm insistent that the product is always more important than
marketing is that the start of any marketing strategy is always about how
interesting, useful and desirable the product is to a consumer. Incredible
marketing cannot save a shit product and the ability to identify shit
products, as well as major issues with any project is absolutely invaluable.

I'd also like to say thank you for the compliment the video as I consider it
to be one of the best things I've been a part of professionally, especially in
regards to the challenge involved. In the case of Augur, finding the fit
actually ended up being the easiest part of the process.

Augur itself has great potential and often results in someone becoming
intrigued to someone having their mind blown. We also had the fortune of
launching while Bitcoin hype was still high, but beginning to decrease in the
beginning of 2015 (I jointed Augur about a month after we completed the
Microsoft integration at BitPay). Another way timing was extremely helpful
would be the rather recent success of Nate Silver, his book The Signal and The
Noise (something I read two years before Augur) and the resulting increased
awareness in the power of prediction markets. The chips seemed to fall in the
right places, in fact looking back at this right now, it was the right time
for us to make our introduction.

There is another unique twist, Augur's decentralized Oracle system required a
distribution of REP to ensure that event reporting can take place when the
project launches.

This meant my role until October of last year was focused on: \- introduce and
explain the project and the team \- engaging the crypto community to build
trust and answer questions \- building relationships w/ respected individuals
in crypto, law, academia & PMs \- explaining why we chose to build on Ethereum
instead of the bitcoin blockchain

These were just what was needed for a the crowdsale to be a success, as most
fail by not taking enough time and putting in the effort to show their
intentions are good and that they are trustworthy and honest. The fact we
raised $5.3 Million in a market as bearish as both BTC & ETH were at the time
is a testament to our strategy until that point.

What I mentioned didn't even include creating the branding, making the
animated explainer videos, getting media coverage, monitoring relevant
communities and doing conferences/meetups.

So I will say that this was a unique situation where a marketing-focus in the
beginning was necessary, but it still relied on a product design that
crowdsale participants would need to believe in before we could raise funds
for development and have an encouraged decentralized community of event
reporters to make the system work.

The last thing is we had a lot of milestones so far and it's been incredible.
Being able to build interest in Ethereum by getting media recognition and a
large community of supporters has had the widest impact thus far. Originally I
was only with Augur through the crowdsale, but Jack and Joey were happy enough
with my work that I was kept on (with fewer hours as there is less marketing
need). This has fluctuated but it has given me the ability to help out other
projects and do consulting, which I find to be awesome.

Our full launch should be happening in the nest few months, which will result
in another shift in my job. I'm already wondering what other crazy things will
happen in this space to make it so challenging yet rewarding!

------
sytse
There is more detailed advice in [https://github.com/rdp/open-source-how-to-
popularize-your-pr...](https://github.com/rdp/open-source-how-to-popularize-
your-project/blob/master/README)

I totally agree that if you want your project to be well know you should cover
the basics: a good readme that includes a description and referable a website.

------
tonyswish
From what I've seen the issue is pretty bad.

I am fairly passionate about open source for a marketer and the last two gigs
I've had were marketing open source projects. Proud to say my love of the
ideology, smart decisions and good work have led me to be rather successful
thus far. I actually picked up my life in Detroit to move to Atlanta, just
because it was a technology I loved and that they were open source believers.

What's interesting is that I've never met, seen online or even heard a story
of someone else in marketing/communications who really shares my love of Open
Source.

I'd estimate that about 90% to 95% of FOSS and Open Source projects don't even
understand that this issue is actually causing people to never hear about
amazing things. Here's a couple issues that I've noticed both first-hand and
from afar:

\- Many projects consist of just one to three developers that think marketing
isn't as important as the product (which I agree with). This attitude results
in a minimal effort that is not maintained after an initial spurt to introduce
what they are doing.

\- IF they decide to have someone dedicated to
marketing/branding/communications, they often have no contacts and little
money so they hire a relative who has no passion, interest or knowledge of the
project. These are the types that think essential marketing is following
thousands on Twitter in hopes they will follow you back to show growth.
Truthfully I think many of the SV types still share this attitude.

\- A few notable projects have contacted me have put me off by their approach
almost immediately. The most notable is a project I was absolutely in love
with. I went in fully prepared, elaborating on the problems I thought they had
(with many concrete examples) and detailed solutions and improvements. The
discussion went fine and it seemed that the founder was impressed by my prep,
enthusiasum and even my ideas....the end of our discussion made it very clear
that any of the strategies I would want to pursue to increase awareness would
not happen due to his hard-headedness. If it wasn't for the fact I already was
part of an incredible project that I've been with since almost day 1, it would
have broken my heart.

\- Generally I prefer to interact and talk with the developers more than the
marketing/business types in the places I've been, but there is one developer
trait that I've noticed occurs nearly all the time and it's very bad for the
project. The inability to both communicate their messaging and understand the
importance of it often goes over their heads.

For those who are curious about my background and what I'm all about, I'm
currently Augur's Director of Marketing. Augur
([http://augur.net](http://augur.net)) is an open source decentralized
prediction platform built on the Ethereum blockchain (AKA one of the hardest
things to explain to a layperson in history). Last year we raised $5.3 Million
in a crowdsale campaign that ended up in the top 25 highest funded
crowdfunding campaigns in history. One of the most important things we did
leading up to the crowdsale was creating an animated explainer video, a rare
time that I spent money on Marketing. Our "How Augur Works" video
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yegyih591Jo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yegyih591Jo))
featured narration from Country Singer Shooter Jennings (he did it as a favor)
and explains the project in an extremely easy to understand way. To date the
video has about 218,000 views and is the most viewed Prediction Market video
in YouTube History.

Simplifying and honing Augur's messaging resulted in many accolades for the
project itself, along with me being named a MAX Marketing Awards Finalist for
the campaign. This was huge for me as the other nominees were campaigns by
Fortune 500 companies like Coca-Cola, The Atlanta Hawks, Cricket Wireless,
Navicure and Southwire. Even though I didn't win, the fact our 6 person
startup with a one person Marketing team were nominated against Coca-Cola's
ShareACoke.com campaign blew me away.

I've wrote way too much, but this is obviously a topic I'm passionate about
and I wanted to give a little advice and share my experience as for some
reason people seem to think that open source means that marketing, branding
and targeted messaging isn't required. There's many other things from Augur
and a ton from my previous position at BitPay that really were great to be a
part of (including the most successful social media campaign in history for a
blockchain company or project). If anyone else wants to read more check out my
website at TonySakich.com, my LinkedIn
([https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonysakich](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tonysakich))
and my Twitter where I talk about this issue quite a bit
[http://twitter.com/tonyswish](http://twitter.com/tonyswish)

Of course I'm also happy to answer any questions here!

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
I'm completely new to marketing; my background is in application security and
cryptography.

One of the open source projects I developed is a CMS that aims to offer
superior security than the alternatives (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal).

[https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/05/keyggdrasil-continuum-
cry...](https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/05/keyggdrasil-continuum-cryptography-
powering-cms-airship)

What are some of the worst/most common sins that I'm committing here from a
marketer's perspective, if any? (The common ones being mostly of interest to
the discussion here.)

~~~
tonyswish
Well I'm just going to quickly go through the link you shared and give my
thoughts as I go along...

Part of the introduction phrase illustrates an immediate problem:

"Although some of what we cover will be complicated, most of these details
will be abstracted away from end users. (Only engineers who want to get their
feet wet in our protocol designs and implementations need to know this
stuff.)"

This leads me to ask a few questions as it really isn't clearly stated. \- Is
this meant to be directed at engineers, end users or both? \- If the answer is
engineers, you should immediately label it as such \- If the answer is end
users, the piece should be rewritten as 75% to 90% would be over most users
heads.

The worst answer to the first question would be both (which is what it appears
to be). This should be split up into two targeted pages. The user page being
extremely simplified and as short as possible. Saying things like "Most of
these details will be abstracted from our end users" will just lead to a
confused user who is unaware of what these details are as they aren't clearly
pointed out.

I actually think the analysis of that phrase does a great job of what I would
say about the entire page. That being that the messaging needs to be separate
for developers/technical users and end users in order to be effective.

If I were working on you with this, this would be the point where I would tell
you to create one focused specifically on technical users while also providing
me with a short list of the most important features that would matter to an
end user. I would then go through those features and create a new page using
simplified language and would try to also create a short animated explainer
video or narrated video walkthrough.

I hope I was able to go into a little detail without going too deep,
especially as I doubt I can provide this much feedback if there are other
people asking questions (and while I'm happy to help, I still need to draw the
line before I start to charge).

The final thing I'd share is that your background in application security and
cryptography means that you are in the target market of users that understand
technical writing. This means you are the ideal person to market and
communicate with this segment of the audience. The other segment should be
targeted in a TL;DR manner; meaning as few words as possible, short videos and
clearly identifying and explaining your primary selling points.

