ICPs and your community

Yesterday I wrote about ICPs. Today I’m writing about ICPs, too. Though I think the better word is “ideal community member.” Because I want to talk about ICPs and community.

If you are an open source startup — or any other company, because you do not need to be an open source startup to build a community — and you are serious about community building, you need GTM fundamentals for your community. You need to know why people join your community. You need to share a vision for the community. And you need to know who your “Ideal Community Member” is.

Ideal community members will always be a subset of your open source users and your commercial customers. Most likely, you won’t get more than 1% of your active users becoming active in your community. But if you want to bump up both engagement and # of active members, get clear on who the community is an ideal fit for. Which could be:

  • Working in a particular industry

  • A certain experience level, either with your specific project or with related technologies

  • Psycho-social characteristics, like being exceptionally paranoid about privacy or security

  • Being in a particular geography

  • Having certain professional goals

But let’s tie this back to building your company, too: As you think about who your community is for, remember that you’re not building this community for fun. You’re building if for fun and profit. Make sure the community you’re building is clearly connected to your business goals — and given that communities don’t develop overnight, align your community with your medium-term goals, not the target for next quarter. Make sure the Ideal Community Member your community is targeted for is in alignment with people best suited to become your company’s champions and evangelists, both inside their companies and in the larger ecosystem.

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Do you know a founder of an open source startup who is struggling to differentiate their product and project from competitors? Tell them to get in touch.

Know a project maintainer who has a free open source project that they’re struggling to describe in a way that makes sense? Send them my ebook on positioning free open source software.

Emily Omier