On a recent flight to Ireland, I found myself reading Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” to pass the time. If you’ve never read it yourself, the classic fish-out-of-water tale recounts the narrator’s trials and tribulations in Arthurian England. Taking advantage of his modern sensibilities, he positions himself as a powerful wizard and sets to building institutions that improve society as well as his own political and economic clout. It’s a hilarious account and well worth the read (excepting Twain’s sporadic remarks highlighting his resentment for Native Americans).
It also got me thinking about how my own knowledge of open source ecosystems shapes how I think about B2B software marketing today. The commercial open source software (COSS) model has flipped the traditional SaaS sales process on its head, often making the same (or an approximate) product as a SaaS solution available to developers for free via open source. Marketers now must delineate clearly between open source and commercial offerings. Furthermore, marketers seemingly compete against their own open source offerings when convincing users to convert from open source to paid enterprise solutions. In short, commercial open source software forces marketing to reevaluate their assumptions about B2B software marketing.
Three Obvious Takeaways about Commercial Open Source Software Marketing
Here are three takeaways that are painfully obvious to me as someone who thinks about open source software every day, but may be counterintuitive if you’re new to open source B2B marketing:
Open Source Adoption is the Top of the PaaS/IaaS Sales Funnel
The first step to building a successful commercial open source offering is to build your open source community. Makes sense, right? By growing your open source community, you grow the pool of potential commercial users. Therefore, open source and commercial efforts can no longer exist as independent strategies. Your open source community includes all your open source and commercial users, and your sales and marketing efforts should be spent building a frictionless conversion path from open source user to enterprise customers.
Why waste time hunting down enterprise customers who have never heard of your solution when you have a pool of open source developers who have self-selected themselves and have already invested time learning your solution? Help your open source users be successful and you’ll build loyalty. Ultimately, growing your open source community is how you’ll convert the most qualified open source users into enterprise customers.Open Source Developers are Their Own Buying Center
The era of top down technology purchasing is over. It’s no longer about convincing the CTO of a Fortune 500 company to adopt your solution. Even if said CTO is your biggest advocate, unless the nuts and bolts developer has self-selected your technology for their project, good luck getting anything off the ground. The reality today is that developers are their own buying center. Often times, developers have great latitude in choosing their own open source components and architectures, and prototype independently of managerial oversight.
Solutions architects and engineering leadership still play a critical role in the commercialization of products and may own the budget line item, but more often than not developers will choose their own technology solutions and will ultimately be the ones who advocate for converting to enterprise versions when it makes sense.User Experience is the Key to Success for Your Commercial Solution
Why would you choose to pay for a product when you can get roughly the same thing for free? The answer; it’s all about user experience. When developers choose to pay for an enterprise version of an open source product, chances are it’s not for a new technological capability. More often than not, developers are choosing to pay for a commercial offering because it reduces their own operational headaches.
The way to convert open source users to paying users is to make the conversion path frictionless. Your PaaS/IaaS commercial offering should be the ABSOLUTELY IDEAL experience for users of your technology. By streamlining onboarding, simplifying management/configuration features, and ensuring seamless integrations with complementary technologies, users will ultimately decide it’s a no-brainer to convert to being paid users. Alternatively, if your commercial offering has a steep learning curve, what’s the point of paying?
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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.