Identifying 'ideal users' of open source projects

The first part of positioning any product that has active customers is identifying the best-fit customers — the customers who would gladly pay double for the product, who pay on time, renew early and don’t have tons of compliants to support.

How does that translate to an open source project?

It’s actually fairly straighforward. Open source projects don’t ask anyone for money, but they do ask for something more valuable: Time. Not every user of an open source project becomes a contributor — the ‘time’ ask is basically on a donation basis. Nonetheless, those people who do become contributors — and the more active, the better — those are your ‘best-fit’ users. They are the one most invested in your project’s continued success. So invested that they’ve decided to donate their time.

Start by looking at active contributors to find who your 'best-fit’ users are.

Not all contributors are ideal

This doesn’t mean that all contributors are ideal users. But if you’re the maintainer, you should have a pretty good idea of who is well-aligned with the project and who always wants to take it off on a tangent.

This doesn’t mean should should ignore all tangents, especially if new feature requests are coming up frequently. But to better position the project that you currently have, focus on those people who seem to love the project as it is now and focus their efforts as a contributor on making already-existing functionality even better.

Talk to them

The next step in the positioning process is to… talk to those ideal users. I’ll talk about that more tomorrow.