Comment by Gergely Polonkai on "Best ways to service an open sourced community?"

Be honest, and ask for a story (and be prepared that a lot of developers are bad storytellers.)

Before doing anything, learn. Even though you are not a techie, you still have to know what your are talking/asking about. If this is a library that helps interacting with a service or some special hardware, make sure you know something about that service or hardware. If itʼs a support library, make sure you know, on a basic scale, what the library is capable of. If itʼs a UI component or a whole application with a UI (be it web or desktop), get to know what it looks like and what it can do. Also, if you have competitors (and who doesnʼt these days), get some basic knowledge on them, too. At this point you are authentic. You will still learn a lot during your career, but without basic knowledge you are screwed.

Meanwhile, you can start gathering information on people using that software. Collect names and email addresses, and stalk those people (stalk is a harsh word; I mean do intense research on said people.) The main point is to know them and what they use your software for before you ask.

Now you have the knowledge and the data, approach your favourite developers in house. This serves two purposes: you get some exercise, and gather more inside information of your software. Find the guys who not just develop but also use that software. If thereʼs good diversity among the devs (gender, different cultures, etc.) try to find as many different people as possible. Ask them the questions you would like to ask from the actual audience.

And now, contact the consumers of your software. Ask for their story. How did they find your stuff? Why did they choose it over other, similar projects? Are they using it for its intended purpose, or something else? How do they use it? Is it part of their daily job, or something personal? Are there any pain points, bugs, or missing features? What are their favourite parts? If they could choose, what would they make the devs work on? If they wouldnʼt have to care about backwards compatibility, even within their own software, what feature would they remove or change and why? And a lot more.

Most importantly, keep in mind you are stealing their time. Be as short as you can. If they donʼt have the time to answer, ask for a time slot (if you talked with other devs before, you will be able to tell how long it will take.) Donʼt ask irrelevant questions; if you already know an answer, phrase the question like “am I right that you use feature X the most?”. Also, what you are interested in the most are feelings, especially if there is UI involved. If you can meet in person do it, so you can read their emotions. Or maybe donʼt, at least not until you have some answers and experience already.

I think thatʼs all. Iʼm sorry if I wrote something obvious, but without knowing the details both about you or the software, I tried to be as generic as possible. Feel free to ask more in the comments, Iʼm happy to update my answer with more details if needed.

Thank you for taking the time to respond so thoughtfully, this is immensely helpful!! I have scheduled time to dig into the UI and talk to some devs on the product. Their open source is truly that, they don't collect personal info on people using their API, but through some data mining I think I can start to figure out types of users/specific roles. The time call out is massively important and I appreciate you driving that point home. Thank you, again.

You donʼt necessarily have to data mine. If you have a public issue tracker, just look at the core contributors (outside the internal devs, of course). Also, if you give me a link, I can dig in, too; maybe I use it already or would be useful.

And that is something I forgot to add to the answer: donʼt be shy advertising the product (but be reasonable doing so). This way you can get some direct input without ever reaching out. Think about mailing lists, forums, etc. Itʼs not your job, per se, but your marketing department (if you have one) may get grateful. That said, if you do have a marketing department, contact them for a list on where they share information on the product.

Gergely - sorry for the delay here!! I haven't logged in for a few weeks. Alas, here I am and also moved forward with the job opportunity :) Exciting new chapter. Yes, here is a link to our Github. I'd definitely be interested to see what you think! github.com/pilosa/pilosa It is a distributed bitmap index, which helps to significantly accelerate the speed at which data is accessed and queried.

We do not have a marketing department, I am the only 'commercial' arm of the company so I will likely impact this. I'm glad to hear you say that because I think there is a bit of hesitancy to put marketing dollars behind this when we want to focus on organic growth and maintain a community first mindset. That said, I think there are appropriate channels for paid marketing that wouldn't be astronomical in pricing.

I took a quick look, the project looks awesome. I will spin up an instance soon and try what it can do for me. As a security personnel, the network security use case looks promising to me.

I saw that you have commercial editions, which means sooner or later you will need a marketing and sales team, but as a community manager, that’s clearly not your job (well, unless you want to move on to a new role, of course). If you want to market it, look around for similar product, and don’t be afraid to write comparison articles. For the first sight, I feel some similarity with the Elastic Stack; if I’m right, you can start with that. If you can highlight a good feature set and share this article in the appropriate groups (finding these will take some research; consider looking at data analyst groups on popular networks like LinkedIn and Facebook), you can easily build up a follower base. From that, all you have to do is writing up good articles, so your initial followers will share them. Keep in touch with the ones that reply; they can become your core community members.

If your do write such articles, make sure you share them here on Hashnode, or even write them on this platform. This can help both your software and Hashnode (sorry, it’s the Evangelist that speaks from me now.)

Also, if you don’t do it already, follow some online marketers/community builders to get more ideas. One I dare suggesting is Josh Spector; that guy built a follower base of 5000 in mere days, so his tips and tricks are really good.

Search Hashnode