Why your open source project needs marketing help

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.

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So, I'd be in favour for it.

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!

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.