My job is convincing people to use free software. Intuitively, you would think it’s easier to sell something that’s free than convincing someone to pay you. It’s not.
Even if you’re not asking a developer for money, you’re still asking for value. Learning any new code project, open source or otherwise, requires a non-insignificant investment of valuable developer time and brain cycles. When the payoff outweighs the investment, developers are more than motivated to read your documentation and try your tutorials. That’s why it’s mission-critical to be clear and explicit about the benefit your solution offers potential adopters; it gives them a foundation to evaluate whether your project is worth the investment.
My coworker and Swim’s lead designer, Will Richards, is our internal champion for promoting empathy in design, whether for industrial control systems, mobile apps, websites, or t-shirts. His influence has permeated the way we build interfaces, design user flows, document code, and even write blogs. Empathy is an important part of every design, product and campaign, so it’s a good place to start when evangelizing open source software, too. First, you start by setting clear and honest expectations for potential users. Then you grow your open source ecosystem by reducing friction for user adoption with new tools, third-party integrations, SDKs, protocol connectors and other enhancements.
Content Marketing and Open Source Software
But even having set clear expectations, you still need to convince a developer to invest time and effort learning a new technology. This challenge is compounded when you’re trying to evangelize a technology that runs counter to the common wisdom of the software world, as is the case with Swim.ai. Our open source Swim project enables the creation of distributed, end-to-end streaming applications using a revolutionary stateful application platform. It’s built on top of a unique messaging protocol called WARP, which enables bidirectional multiplexing over single web socket connections. In fewer words, Swim enables massively complex real-time applications to run on an astoundingly simple decentralized application architecture. It’s even more awesome than it sounds, but it also sounds like a ton of risk for a developer evaluating new software projects.
The solution to this open source evangelism paradox is content marketing.
In the open source world, the most important raw material for content marketing is code. The second most important raw material is documentation written by the people who built the code. When these raw materials are made available, any number of code tutorials and videos, podcasts, blogs, powerpoint presentations, and infographics can be generated. Each of these materials can provide developers with additional information to evaluate new open source projects. But it’s the code and documentation that builds trust with potential adopters and proves that your project isn’t just overhyped vaporware.
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Bradley Johnson is a marketing and information technology professional based in San Jose, CA. He specializes in digital marketing and go-to-market strategy for early stage software startups, and is currently the Marketing Director of open source strategy at Swim.ai.
Connect with him on Twitter, LinkedIn, or via email at brad@johnsn.co.