Emily Omier

Open source businesses commit themselves to building both a vibrant community of open source users as well as a profitable customer base. Sure, the open source project can drive commercial adoption,but the profile and needs of open source users are fundamentally different from the profile and priorities of a good commercial customer. If, as an open source business, you want to effectively grow both community use and revenue, you need to understand the profile, needs and pain points unique to their open source software users as well as the profile, needs and pain points unique to their commercial customers — and understand how the two profiles both overlap and diverge. In this talk, Emily Omier will show attendees how to position their open source project and commercial product(s) so that each one has a unique message and clearly defined ideal user profile, while also developing an umbrella positioning and narrative for the entire company. Attendees will leave with a framework for how to work out the positioning for both open source and commercial products, as well as an understanding of why it matters and what to do once they’ve figured out the positioning basics.

Though open source maintainers have many different goals, most of those goals depend on growing the project’s usage and community engagement. As projects get larger, they are able to attract new contributors and new funding opportunities, allowing maintainers to fix bugs and add features more quickly. A larger, more engaged community of users also decreases the risk that an open source project will be abandoned, creating a virtuous cycle of trust as more organizations feel comfortable using the project in mission-critical applications. Whether a project is a hobby side project or backed by a Fortune 10 company, growth matters. This half-day workshop is for any maintainer who cares about their projects’ growth, both in terms of number of users and engagement of existing users. Attendees will learn about the strategies and tactics to increase downloads, active user base, project stickiness, and community engagement. Topics we will explore include but are not limited to: Project positioning & messaging Non-slimy marketing techniques Collecting and acting on user feedback DevRel activities and optimization Keeping users happy via support, fixes, and education Tracking and measuring project growth Community management Attendees will leave with concrete ideas for how to accelerate their projects’ growth.

Other people: Matt Yonkovit

Do you really know what your users think about you? If you’re not doing user interviews, you probably don’t. In this talk, Emily Omier will help attendees understand why user interviews are so important, how to run an interview that provides good information and what to do with the information you get. Spoiler: often the best interviews are also the most awkward.