Open source software can capture a large usage surface by the myriads of contributions they can accept.
It would help fight the more general NIH syndrome, and maybe educate people towards having sound IS urbanization, architecture.
I'm currently battling with an organic data processing pipeline written in 5 languages operating on 4 databases. A proper ETL properly architectured would have saved money.
This week I had to insert yet another slice in a time sandwich. I dream of sound mutable/immutable separation, disk space, retry strategies, idempotence, and rematerialization.
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.
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!
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.
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) 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) 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) and my Twitter where I talk about this issue quite a bit http://twitter.com/tonyswish
Of course I'm also happy to answer any questions here!
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.)
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.
That's an interesting question that I just may do a poor job of answering due to lack of a current strategy, but I will try.
I'm completely unaware to what level there is a strategy to market the kernel itself. What I do know off the top of my head is that it's used by Linux, Android and Chrome OS. The fact I'm aware of this but know very little about the competitive landscape is definitely a positive indicator.
This is truthfully the type of question that would require a lot of time, research and perspectives from both "inside" and "outside".
If I mis-understood your question I do apologize. I will say that there has never been more awareness, use and "awareness of use"in Linux at any time in my life. It seems like in about the last five years, many aspects of technology have clued in on how important and beneficial Linux is to everyone.
I find interesting that when "Linux Adoption" is discussed, it always seems to be in terms of traditional desktop users. This also means that the Linux Adoption figure they are seeking will always be disappointing and demoralizing.
I'm not sure if it would ever be possible for a Linux Desktop Distro to get ahead of OSX or Windows in market share, as the exact thing that makes Linux great is what holds it back from gaining widespread acceptance. I would never use a Linux Distro as my primary OS over OSX. I prefer OSX as I generally am biased toward UNIX based operating system, but the user experience, convenience & compatibility between OSX and Linux is night and day.
What I'm proud to say is that I have two or three Raspberry Pi's around here that run Linux Distributions and I love playing around with them. I hope someday I work on a project that is closely identified with Linux as the learning experience would be intense, but extremely fun and gratifying!
