Revenue growth and positioning

What’s the relationship between revenue growth and positioning?

A: Good positioning will supercharge your revenue growth. Bad positioning will act like a drag on growth.

I hesitate to say you can’t have decent growth without good positioning. I think you can have a terribly positioning OSS or commercial product and still experience growth (in users, community and/or revenue). But bad positioning will always be a drag on growth. So a poorly positioned project/product/company with decent growth numbers would have phenomenal growth numbers with better positioning.

If you want to maximize the advantages of good positioning and you have an open source company, you need to:

  • Position your open source project well

  • Position your commercial offering(s) well, and in a way that makes sense in relation to the open source software

  • Position your entire company in a way that is coherent with the open source project and the commercial offerings

When done right, it will supercharge growth for both your project and your revenue.

Emily Omier