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Ask HN: How do you market Open Source Software?

3 points by Daniel-Pan ↗ HN
We are planning to move our software from closed to open source, and we are looking on how we can market this product to reach our target market.

Btw: Its an alternative to Zendesk, Jira, and linear.

13 comments

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bbor
Are you asking about marketing techniques as in advertising strategies, or are you asking about the underlying business model?

If the former: the README.md is by far the most important artifact, and specifically the first scroll or two. The call to action (installing/trying it out/clicking to your pricing page/whatever) should be clear and upfront and easy.

Having a website that uses popular doc rendering frameworks also help -- people will recognize the look and feel and feel somewhat assured. Tho I suppose a task planning app prolly has docs figured out.

Godspeed, and thanks for sharing your work with the world! We need it, and we appreciate it.

mandarinclips
My approach:

1.Open source + polished README

2.Listed on directories like create.io

3.Added to awesome-rust

4.Did a Show HN post

That's all I've done so far. 60 stars currently.

andsoitis
Why do you think your target market would change? I would have guessed the target market is the same, so marketing should be straight forward: same demographics but differentiating you from the pack and how it matters.
Daniel-Pan
makes sense. (i have not been clear) my question is not about whether the target market changes , it about how after having a open source product how the distribution changes.
ThrowawayR2
[delayed]
Daniel-Pan
i am not asking if being open source being itself a marketing a strategy, but how people discover them, and what channels work for getting devs to try them.
Swankivo
The three products you named each had a sharp, different target. Zendesk for support teams, Jira for engineering orgs, Linear for startup product teams. What's missing from your post is who your target is.

Who is the real target of the thing you're building? Not "we want to be an alternative to these tools," but the people who won't be satisfied by anything except your service. Put the other way around: who exactly are the people using those three tools today and still feeling the friction?

Only once you've pinned that down can you even start discussing marketing strategy, open source vs closed source included.

Daniel-Pan
Out target market include people who have repos in GitHub (opensource), and they connect with their community using Discord, Forum and emails.

The problem we identified is that when managing a repo, customer queries raised in GitHub, or any other platform, to see if that has been resolved before or not, is manual. We are automating this process.

We are not sure in which platform our target market exist but we can categorize from open source teams or devs in software and gaming.

gus_massa
Open core or full open source?

MIT or AGPL?

How do you expect to get money?

Skiffssh
i havent marketed my project skiff on hacker news yet and still have 155 stars on github what i did was i publish my project on selfh.st and was lucky enough to get place in the newsletter which brought like around thousand of views on my repo. though now i am thinking of making a proper post on hacker news