commercial positioning of opensource software

FOSSy Open Source

Positioning is how/where you talk about your thing.

Baking soda is used for:

• cleaning
• deodorizing
• making baked good fluffy

You should:

• Narrow down your target market
• Be clear about what people will get out of it

In the beginning, positioning for a normal company is easy. Product & company are identical.

For an open source company, there’s positioning for open source software & a commercial offering as they have different users/needs. You also need a coherent story for the whole company so you end up with more of an umbrella positioning in addition.

Who cares?

• positioning helps to know if you’re targeting niche groups or broad groups.
• gotta get money
• very relevant for marketing/outreach

Bad positioning

• screws revenue growth.
• low value proposition
• is embarassing when you can’t articulate why your thing is good

CorporateOSS (COSS) adds additional layers.

1. Waste resources (which you don’t have a lot of)
2. Commercial strategy may not make sense
3. Marketing is harder (for both the open source and commercial thing)

Better positioning may offer:

• better sales pipeline (people know what you do)
• ^^ get more paying folks
• differentiate OSS and commercial offering
• which allows you to increase your price

tl;dr: Clearly articulated value for commercial offerings over open source software aids in commercial viability. This allows you to increase price, close faster, etc.

Prompts

1. Who are your best customers?
   • COSS: Who are the most profitable (not necessarily the biggest)?
   • OSS: Who are the biggest evangelists?
2. What would your best users do if you ceased to exist?
3. What are the pain points you’re solving?
   • It’s probably quite different from OSS vs COSS
4. What are the unique attributes?
   • “open source” is an attribute, not a value.
   • for many COSS customers, OSS may have negative connotations.
   • Are they thinking OSS = “flexible/secure”? or “poor UI/no support”?
5. How do you transition the attributes into values (aka why someone would care)?
   • Never lean into “free as in beer” for COSS,
6. Consolidate into 1-4 business values/outcomes (aim for 3).
   • One is enough if people care a lot about it.
7. Who, specifically, cares about these values?
   • Characteristics of a champion:
     • Personal: paranoid about privacy, open source true believer
     • Job: responsible for certain outcomes
       • Job titles aren’t actually very informationally dense. Instead, write down their responsibilities.
     • Work history: has experience w/ the problem you solve
8. For COSS, users can block deals, but don’t usually make them happen.
   • Users primarily matter in the OSS world.
9. Characteristics of orgs:
   • industry?
   • regulatory requirements?
   • recently experienced some sort of incident?
10. Describe the project + product in 10 words or less

Homepage is the company positioning.

• It links off to the OSS positioning and to each commercial offering.

Sales:

• Present the suite of products as a unified solution
• Clearly communicate who is best for which options

Suggested guide/template: https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1OJhYyiZ3IlTY9fv9nmtaOgERPxB1KywLs0dHZc5fvEg/mobilebasic?pli=1