Pimping is Hard: The Challenges of Giving Away Your Stuff for Free
The premise sounds easy enough: There’s no arguing with free. In the server control panel market we found a niche dominated by commercial players with a stranglehold on price and a bunch of products that annoy system administrators to the bone. So we set out to create something appealing — software with disruptive potential. With a product in our hands that ticks all the checkboxes in terms of nerd appeal, you would say that this would be as easy a sell as free blowjobs at a LAN party. Unfortunately, things are not quite that simple.
We went through the hoops submitting the news of our release to a dozen of the usual suspects, got a couple of hits and the first testers have arrived. There’s even a couple of people around doing more involved things like trying to port packages to other distros. It’s not bad and we appreciate all the people helping us out by playing with the beta, but a stampede it is not. Building a community takes time.
In terms of strategy, this may be the real reason for the ‘release early, release often’ mantra. Especially when your project is in a niche area, expect community building to take up maybe just as much time as actual development. We wanted to avoid getting distracted by actual users too early in the game, so our gut feeling at the time was ‘early, schmearly’. We had a couple of other reasons, some of them even sounded real good — like how there are too many open source projects in the field that need so much polishing that the market has been mostly ignoring them. But the fact of the matter is, all the hours of community building we’ve been avoiding up to the beta release will have to be put in double now. We’ll need to go from our current mode of reclusive introversion to full-blown extravert. Tough job for a bunch of nerds.
Tags: marketing, open source
April 24th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
here’s a tip guys: put what your product is actually about on your blog.
just a small blurb on the sidebar or in the header. also, go ahead and render the sidebar for individual posts. otherwise this traffic you’re getting from organic search and just natural linking will remain bouncy.
best,
j
April 24th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
@jonathan:
That’s not a bad suggestion. That’s probably another point, feel less dirty when doing marketing :)
April 29th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Keep up the good work guys! This is a very interesting project.
I bet one of your developers is a MacOSX-user (like me), which explains the nice GUI.