Open Source's Positioning Handicap

One of the biggest challenges in positioning open source projects is that you, as the maintainer, just don’t have your finger on the pulse of your user base in the same way a commercial product’s sales team/customer support team would — particularly if the commercial product is sold in sale-led, enterprise-style motions.

Sales teams are going to understand things like what problem the customers want the product to solve, who the true stakeholders are, what alternatives are being considered and what does and does not matter for the customer. Customer support teams are going to understand how customers actually see the product after they’ve had a chance to use it — and how their actual experience differs from the expectations set during the sales process.

But for open source maintainers looking to understand their users? You pretty much have nothing unless you specifically go out looking for it. The closest you’ll get is looking at comments on your Slack/Discord/Community area, but that can be misleading, because only a certain subset of your users will ever interact with your community, and you have no way of knowing if those who do are more or less excited about the project than your average user.

You have to get that information, though, because to position your project well, you need to understand how your most enthusiastic users interact with and think about the project. And in an open source context, you’ll almost always have to proactively reach out to users to get that information.