Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Open core or full open source?
MIT or AGPL?
How do you expect to get money?
by gus_massa - 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.
- 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 newsby Skiffssh
- Being proprietary or open source should not affect your marketing at all. If transitioning to open source is primarily for marketing purposes, it is likely to backfire.by ThrowawayR2
- 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.by andsoitis
- 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.
by bbor - 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.
by Swankivo