On why open source is a fantastic marketing tool, both for positioning and distribution
Grab people's attention and build trust, while building your own stuff. You'll get people to care about your work and support you.
Great marketing is about building trust, not chasing growth. Getting more people to use your product or service is the payback from people trusting what you say, and what you build. Not the other way around. Mind that.
A (to my taste, wrong) belief in doing marketing is that acquisition means distribution. Growing a business is not as trivial as placing ads, writing optimized SEO content, or sending cold emails. Growing a business is the equation of how people find you (distribution, indeed) and how people understand what you build, and why it matters (positioning). Then of course, how people enjoy your product and want to recommend it. Let's focus on the 2 first parameters.
If we aren't able to understand why you're different, and why we should care about it, we'll kinda treat you as a commodity. You'll be a gallon of gas competing against another gallon of gas. So either we're running out of fuel and you've got a chance we choose your pump, or we'll look after the next cheapest gallon on our route.
Don't make your work a commodity. To get positioning right, you'll have to figure out the story and features that connect well together. Back to building trust now. How could you do it, while working on positioning?
You open a direct window to show how things work, from the inside
You show expertise in your field
You pay things forward
Good thing is, open source is a fantastic way to combine all of the above — let me develop and illustrate it with a story.
When Plausible.io launched in early 2019, it was a basic web analytics tool. Its founder Uku had built a lightweight script to provide a more friendly and transparent alternative to Google Analytics. Unlike the #1 web analytics tool, Plausible wasn't free. Uku was not serving ads with customers' data, he was selling a product. Some early beta users got into the program, but it didn't really take off, yet. During the summer, Plausible had reached a bit over $150 in MRR.
Then, something happened. In September Uku announced Plausible would now be fully open source and free to use for the self-hosted version. This – combined with great marketing content — got the traffic to grow. So did conversions.
By being open source, Plausible's positioning was made clearer. To go against Google Analytics, they needed to show how unique their approach was from a product and a marketing standpoint. And make it consistent. Users may didn't need it to move away from Google's services but the fact it was open source helped build trust.
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