Position your open source project
I know, many people in the OSS community are convinced that open source software is a completely different animal from commercial projects. After all, it’s free! It’s about collaboration!
I don’t disagree that it’s different, but there are more similarities than some people recognize. Most people who start an open source project would like to build a community. They want other people to care about the project and to spend their (very valuable) time making it better. We wouldn’t call this sales, but it’s not entirely dissimilar. If you want to build a community, you will need to:
Tell people who might be interested that the project/community exists (otherwise known as ‘marketing’)
Convince people that it is worth their time to become part of the community (otherwise known as ‘sales’)
I’d like to note here that these two things hold true about any community you are trying to build. Want to start an extreme running club? Having a neighborhood block party? Tell people it exists and convince them it’s worth their time. It doesn’t matter if it’s free or not — you still have to do those things. It’s just that when it costs money, you have to convince people to part with both money and time.
Positioning is at least as important for an open source project as it is for a commercial project. I actually think it’s more important. Just as in a commercial project, if you don’t conciously position your OSS, users and potential users will position it for you, and they won’t necessarily position it in a flattering way.
Second, with an open source project you don’t have any interaction with the potential user before he or she decides to give your project a try — or not. That means you don’t get the chance to clear up confusion or dispell incorrection assumptions he or she is making. Most people just have a quick look at the README (by the way, that’s where you should have a mission statement, which is essentially a statement of your positioning) and then either download the project or move on to the millions of other projects on GitHub.
Position the project poorly, and people will make incorrection assumptions. The people who would love your project won’t recognize that it’s for them and will move on; the people who aren’t so perfect will download it anyway and then churn / make oddball feature suggestions / never become involved contributors.
If you’d like to build a community — maybe even monetize the project some day — positioning is critical.
If you’d like to learn more about positioning open source projects, I’m doing a free webinar on May 27th at 9am PT just about positioning open source projects. Register here.