Packaging Ecosystems -Monki Gras 2017
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How to make your open source project MATTER Let’s face it: most open source projects die. “For every Rails, Docker and React, there are thousands of projects that never take off. They die in the lonely corners of GitHub, only to be discovered by bots scanning for SSH private keys. Over the last 5 years, I worked on and off on marketing a piece of infrastructure middleware called Fluentd. We tried many things to ensure that it did not die: From speaking at events, speaking to strangers, giving away stickers, making people install Fluentd on their laptop. Most everything I tried had a small, incremental effect, but there were several initiatives/hacks that raised Fluentd’s awareness to the next level. As I listed up these “ideas that worked”, I noticed the common thread: they all brought Fluentd into a new ecosystem via packaging.”
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Packaging Ecosystems -Monki Gras 2017
- 1. PACKAGING ECOSYSTEMS How to make your open source project MATTER Kiyoto Tamura VP of Marketing, Treasure Data
- 2. OPEN SOURCE = NEW NORMAL
- 6. YET MOST OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS DIE
- 7. CONTEXT: FINDING THE “BOX” IS HARD “My project solves a lot of problems. I mean, why else did I bother writing so much code? I just don’t know what to call it. No, it’s NOT an MVC framework! It’s BETTER than that…” Hmm…so…It’s an MVC framework?
- 10. WE TRIED A LOT OF THINGS. A FEW WORKED. PATTERNS?
- 11. OPEN SOURCE MARKETING FLYWHEEL USERS ECOSYSTEMS RECIPES USE CASES DISTRIBUTION PARTNERSHIP PACKAGING! JOBS TO BE DONE AWARENESS SOLUTIONS
- 12. THREE THINGS TO THINK ABOUT JOBS TO BE DONE LANGUAGES CLOUD
- 13. PACKAGE FOR THE JOB TO BE DONE
- 15. Research what job needs to get done… and package your project for it.
- 16. vs
- 17. JTBD CONTEXT
- 18. EFK!
- 20. To make your project obviously useful, package it into something concrete.
- 23. LANGUAGE MATTERS
- 24. Take advantage of the community behind your chosen language. Then follow your nose.
- 25. HOW FLUENTD GOT HERE
- 27. “That competition is the cloud. Competition is an interesting term to use, to be sure, because the cloud is built for the most part from open source software, and the cloud is such an important channel that it has elevated open source projects such as Ubuntu to first class citizen status.” http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2016/06/02/future-of-open-source/
- 28. Each of them is an entry point into a new ecosystem. Package for ‘em to leverage ‘em. (Same applies to other clouds!)
- 29. YOU NEVER KNOW UNTIL YOU TRY
Editor's Notes
- My name is Kiyoto My day job is the typical marketeering stuff… But today I’m here to share my experience with a very specific type of marketing: open source software marketing. Now, nobody really needs to be convinced that open source is here to stay.
- …we have platforms like GitHub for collaboration.
- …and seeing a massive cultural shift
- …it’s easy to forget that silicon valley giants weren’t very open to open sourcing. Hadoop…
- Yet…the survival rate, or half life of open source projects are pretty short.
- - We have the platform, we have more progressive employers, and we have more and greater sources of inspiration and expertise than ever before. So why do most projects still fail? I believe there are two problems: context and distribution.
- First, context. developers are not always good at putting their project in context. It’s about allowing people to put your project in the box. It’s about telling a story. But even after you figure our your story, there’s a problem of getting people to listen to your story.
- And that’s about distribution. This part is really like good old marketing. EXCEPT you are marketing a particular product to a particular audience: open source project to developers. So this brings me to my own experience with Fluentd.
- Early 2014, my CTO came to me and said… (tell stories, why, etc.) And off I went and tried a bunch of things
- Spoke at an event at pivotal My colleague found bigger opportunities to speak Hundreds of mailing list replies Documentation work Even some ads (don’t) A few things worked. And as I look back on…
- - I actually use the same framework for all content/inbound marketing at Treasure Data. The idea is to always start with users and the ecosystems they belong. Then figure out what are the jobs to be done. Which creates solutions, making yourself valuable to various partners And the flywheel starts to turn. And can you guess what the key ingredient/lgrease the gears for this marketing flywheel? (CLICK) Packaging! So how do we do it?
- So the first one: package for the job to be done
- How many of you have heard this concept “the job to be done”?
- Popularized (at least in Silicon Valley) by Intercom Start with customer pain Heroku: “when I prototype an app, I want to focus on the app, not infrastructure, so I can get version 1 out quicker and iterate” It really is the “obvious way” to think about building the product, yet hard to practice So the first lesson I learned is:
- Research what job needs to get done, and package your project for it. I want to share one (and probably the most successful) example of this from working on Fluentd.
- As I spoke to the early adopters of Fluentd, Logstash v. Fluentd was false The job to be done: Splunk is convenient but not fitting in their budget/too expensvie for some of their new projects ELK v. Splunk Logstash wasn’t our competition. It was just one of the options, like which filesystem you choose when compiling Linux. So we went on and created how to make Fluentd work with Elasticsearch and Kibana as an alternative to Splunk
- - It was by far the most successful ”content marketing” I’ve ever been part of. - Two things to keep in mind: (CLICK): It was not about being open source. It was about being free. (CLICK): and the key thing is that it put Fluentd in context. It was one part of the solutions. And it really changed the growth trajectory for Fluentd.
- This is the # of Github stars on Fluentd, which I’ve used as a proxy for its awareness. There’s an auxiliary point to make about this. And that is…
- Documentation is packaging. Our EFK “content” was essentially documentation done right. Looking for a role model: DIGITAL OCEAN. There’s another lesson here.
- - And my favorite example is Docker
- One of the key people in the early phase of Growth was Julien Barbier who led their community marketing. Back in 2014 when Docker was beginnig to take off, I contacted Julien and asked. So that was about the job to be done.
- Q: how many of you are familiar with Redmonk’s programming language rankings?
- - it’s fascinating – popularity to think about, but it’s not everything - But it totally dictates how you should craft your distribution strategy
- It started with Matz Then Chef and Puppet (really because we were a Ruby shop and were the users of Chef. Puppet soon came along) That led to the awareness among the more “progressive” operations engineers. Which led us to working with Docker and Kubernetes And then to the cloud platforms
- Why? Because it’s the biggest software distribution channel
- I literally googled this slide… So good job redmonk. Faith restored in SEO
- And there are so many ways to get started on this.