Why your open source project needs marketing help
From what I&#x27;ve seen the issue is pretty bad.<p>I am fairly passionate about open source for a marketer and the last two gigs I&#x27;ve had were marketing open source projects. Proud to say my love of the ideology, smart decisions and good work have led me to be rather successful thus far. I actually picked up my life in Detroit to move to Atlanta, just because it was a technology I loved and that they were open source believers.<p>What&#x27;s interesting is that I&#x27;ve never met, seen online or even heard a story of someone else in marketing&#x2F;communications who really shares my love of Open Source.<p>I&#x27;d estimate that about 90% to 95% of FOSS and Open Source projects don&#x27;t even understand that this issue is actually causing people to never hear about amazing things. Here&#x27;s a couple issues that I&#x27;ve noticed both first-hand and from afar:<p>- Many projects consist of just one to three developers that think marketing isn&#x27;t as important as the product (which I agree with). This attitude results in a minimal effort that is not maintained after an initial spurt to introduce what they are doing.<p>- IF they decide to have someone dedicated to marketing&#x2F;branding&#x2F;communications, they often have no contacts and little money so they hire a relative who has no passion, interest or knowledge of the project. These are the types that think essential marketing is following thousands on Twitter in hopes they will follow you back to show growth. Truthfully I think many of the SV types still share this attitude.<p>- A few notable projects have contacted me have put me off by their approach almost immediately. The most notable is a project I was absolutely in love with. I went in fully prepared, elaborating on the problems I thought they had (with many concrete examples) and detailed solutions and improvements. The discussion went fine and it seemed that the founder was impressed by my prep, enthusiasum and even my ideas....the end of our discussion made it very clear that any of the strategies I would want to pursue to increase awareness would not happen due to his hard-headedness. If it wasn&#x27;t for the fact I already was part of an incredible project that I&#x27;ve been with since almost day 1, it would have broken my heart.<p>- Generally I prefer to interact and talk with the developers more than the marketing&#x2F;business types in the places I&#x27;ve been, but there is one developer trait that I&#x27;ve noticed occurs nearly all the time and it&#x27;s very bad for the project. The inability to both communicate their messaging and understand the importance of it often goes over their heads.<p>For those who are curious about my background and what I&#x27;m all about, I&#x27;m currently Augur&#x27;s Director of Marketing. Augur (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;augur.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;augur.net</a>) is an open source decentralized prediction platform built on the Ethereum blockchain (AKA one of the hardest things to explain to a layperson in history). Last year we raised $5.3 Million in a crowdsale campaign that ended up in the top 25 highest funded crowdfunding campaigns in history. One of the most important things we did leading up to the crowdsale was creating an animated explainer video, a rare time that I spent money on Marketing. Our &quot;How Augur Works&quot; video (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=yegyih591Jo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=yegyih591Jo</a>) featured narration from Country Singer Shooter Jennings (he did it as a favor) and explains the project in an extremely easy to understand way. To date the video has about 218,000 views and is the most viewed Prediction Market video in YouTube History.<p>Simplifying and honing Augur&#x27;s messaging resulted in many accolades for the project itself, along with me being named a MAX Marketing Awards Finalist for the campaign. This was huge for me as the other nominees were campaigns by Fortune 500 companies like Coca-Cola, The Atlanta Hawks, Cricket Wireless, Navicure and Southwire. Even though I didn&#x27;t win, the fact our 6 person startup with a one person Marketing team were nominated against Coca-Cola&#x27;s ShareACoke.com campaign blew me away.<p>I&#x27;ve wrote way too much, but this is obviously a topic I&#x27;m passionate about and I wanted to give a little advice and share my experience as for some reason people seem to think that open source means that marketing, branding and targeted messaging isn&#x27;t required. There&#x27;s many other things from Augur and a ton from my previous position at BitPay that really were great to be a part of (including the most successful social media campaign in history for a blockchain company or project). If anyone else wants to read more check out my website at TonySakich.com, my LinkedIn (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;tonysakich" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.linkedin.com&#x2F;in&#x2F;tonysakich</a>) and my Twitter where I talk about this issue quite a bit <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;tonyswish" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;tonyswish</a><p>Of course I&#x27;m also happy to answer any questions here!