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I'm not trying to take anything away from you at all, because what you've provided is very good. However, I'd like to say something about marketing vs sales, in

by k3n 13y ago

I'm not trying to take anything away from you at all, because what you've provided is very good. However, I'd like to say something about marketing vs sales, in that it seems like your material is more geared towards sales than marketing. I'm going to go off on a tangent here somewhat, bear with me... To explain in my eyes, I see marketing as everything you do to promote your project (i.e. brand/product/etc.), which may not always have a direct financial payout tied to it. For instance, FOSS projects have their own motivations for gaining usage and popularity, and revenue may be tied to that, but they're not explicitly selling anything. But, they do wish to get noticed, to have people try them out, etc. and so they are selling the idea of their project even though they're not actually ringing anything up at the register. On the other hand, "sales" is much more closely coupled with driving a user to purchase (or maybe even just 'sign-up' for) your service or product. This is what I'm mostly seeing in the slides: pricing, email campaigns, conversion rates, etc. These are all pretty exclusive to making a sale, and while they do embody marketing concepts, there's a lot more to marketing than simply corralling the customer to the register. Why am I droning on about this? I'll admit that it's for selfish reasons; I was hoping to see some marketing guidance for the page itself. I review lots of projects, and a majority of them that are created by engineers fall into one of the following buckets: * zero marketing whatsoever, possibly only a github page with a couple sentences in a readme * poorly-constructed marketing, such as using lots of buzzwords and generic phrases without actually telling me anything at all about what the project actually is or does; for instance, many times the only blurb given is akin to "cures what ails you" Now there are some that get it right, though I suspect that many of these either have someone with marketing skills on the team, or they've had an actual marketing guru help them out. That, or they're generally really observant and pick-up on it without having to study. Either way, when I review a project, it's a shame that the basics are so often neglected: * problem definition: in explicit terms, what problem(s) does your project solve? * product differentiation: if yours is "the best", "an alternative", "the new way", etc., then why do you think that? Why should I choose yours over X? If you can provide some concrete examples here, all the better. * product demo: if it can be demo'd, then please at least create a simple working demo. Note: I don't consider projects that include demos as a part of the source code, which must be downloaded, built, and configured as a proper demo. I also don't consider any that require you to register or provide an email address as a proper demo, either. Unless it's a very pressing need that I have, I'm not going to spend 5-15m fiddling with your source or giving away my info. Just host it somewhere so that I -- and possibly my CTO/CEO/purchasing agent -- can see it in action. * licensing, terms and conditions, etc.: make them prominent enough that I don't need to browse your source files or open a support request to find out if I can even use it. Sorry, this got longer than I anticipated...

ScottBurson 13y ago
Hi k3n, I would love your feedback on a project of mine. It's not a FOSS project, but is related to them. You'll see more about it in my profile. If you're willing to help me out a little, please contact me (my email address is in my profile).
- k3n 13y ago
  Hi! I'll preface this by letting you know that I'm not a marketing professional -- I'm in development, and so my POV is going to be more technically-oriented, but I did give your site a glance and it's very approachable by my standards: * a simple, non-distracting design * text is easy to read and there's no feel of keyword stuffing or buzzword bingo * you define the problem and offer product differentiation both in the first 2 sentences (can't get much better than that IMO) * you have both an "about" and a FAQ * terms are easy to find The main thing I'm seeing that you're missing are more of what the OP talks about, in the sense that the 'call to action' seems weak. There's the "for developers" part, though nothing for the "for users". If I understand correctly, perhaps you could link to /browse for the users? Or conversely, if the "for developers" is the meat & bones and there really isn't too much for users, I might suggest making the "for devs" a little more prominent and the "for users" a little less prominent -- such as placing devs above users or something... not sure, but it does seem that your site has a strong opening and good content, but is lacking somewhat in guiding users what to do next. For instance, I'll keep it in mind incase a need for something like this ever makes itself apparent, though if it a list of projects involved and recognized one I use, I might dig in further to see if I wanted to pledge (I do realize this could be the chicken & egg problem if it's a new site).
  - ScottBurson 13y ago
    Thanks very much! I was going for a clean, simple design, so I'm glad that came through. I agree, the calls to action need work. Users will normally enter the site through a link given them by a developer, that will take them to one of the developer's proposals; that's where their call to action should be, I think. (There is one, but it needs to be more prominent and a little easier to use.) But I have a more fundamental problem: I have yet to find any developers who actually want to use this thing. I mean, any at all. Admittedly, I haven't been looking much yet outside my own circles, which are fairly small. But it seems at first glance that there aren't that many OSS developers who are even interested in being paid for their work. It appears that a fairly focused search is going to be necessary to find the ones who are. So what I wanted to ask you is this: in your reviews of OSS projects, what fraction would you say evince a reasonable degree of marketing savvy? Would you be comfortable sharing any names of those who do? My thinking here is that those who actually think about their project as a product, to some extent, are likelier candidates to be interested in my site. Any general observations you might have about OSS developer psychology would also be of interest.

by k3n 13y ago

ScottBurson 13y ago

Hi k3n, I would love your feedback on a project of mine. It's not a FOSS project, but is related to them. You'll see more about it in my profile. If you're willing to help me out a little, please contact me (my email address is in my profile).

k3n 13y ago
Hi! I'll preface this by letting you know that I'm not a marketing professional -- I'm in development, and so my POV is going to be more technically-oriented, but I did give your site a glance and it's very approachable by my standards: * a simple, non-distracting design * text is easy to read and there's no feel of keyword stuffing or buzzword bingo * you define the problem and offer product differentiation both in the first 2 sentences (can't get much better than that IMO) * you have both an "about" and a FAQ * terms are easy to find The main thing I'm seeing that you're missing are more of what the OP talks about, in the sense that the 'call to action' seems weak. There's the "for developers" part, though nothing for the "for users". If I understand correctly, perhaps you could link to /browse for the users? Or conversely, if the "for developers" is the meat & bones and there really isn't too much for users, I might suggest making the "for devs" a little more prominent and the "for users" a little less prominent -- such as placing devs above users or something... not sure, but it does seem that your site has a strong opening and good content, but is lacking somewhat in guiding users what to do next. For instance, I'll keep it in mind incase a need for something like this ever makes itself apparent, though if it a list of projects involved and recognized one I use, I might dig in further to see if I wanted to pledge (I do realize this could be the chicken & egg problem if it's a new site).
- ScottBurson 13y ago
  Thanks very much! I was going for a clean, simple design, so I'm glad that came through. I agree, the calls to action need work. Users will normally enter the site through a link given them by a developer, that will take them to one of the developer's proposals; that's where their call to action should be, I think. (There is one, but it needs to be more prominent and a little easier to use.) But I have a more fundamental problem: I have yet to find any developers who actually want to use this thing. I mean, any at all. Admittedly, I haven't been looking much yet outside my own circles, which are fairly small. But it seems at first glance that there aren't that many OSS developers who are even interested in being paid for their work. It appears that a fairly focused search is going to be necessary to find the ones who are. So what I wanted to ask you is this: in your reviews of OSS projects, what fraction would you say evince a reasonable degree of marketing savvy? Would you be comfortable sharing any names of those who do? My thinking here is that those who actually think about their project as a product, to some extent, are likelier candidates to be interested in my site. Any general observations you might have about OSS developer psychology would also be of interest.