Playing the hand you have

Everyone has certain competitive advantages built-in, because of who they are, their background, their expertise, their location and more. This came up in one of the entrepreneurship panels at State of Open Con this week, and the point was one I completely agree with — that you have to figure out what your strengths are, and play to them.

That is the gist of all good positioning, and it’s something you can do whether you’re a volunteer maintainer or a startup founder.

Figure out what attributes of the project (or the company, or team of maintainers) are that are unique. Sometimes is features, sure. But it can be that you, one of the founders, wrote a book on the subject so you have credibility. It could be your physical location — a company I worked with realized that the fact that their cloud offering is hosted in Europe is completely unique and really, really important to a lot of the cloud customers. Many of those same customers care that the company is located in Europe, too.

Acknowledge those strengths, talk about them and do things that reinforce those strengths. Accept that you, your team, your project and your product will suck at some things, and therefore some people will not like it. That’s ok.