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🍐 42: Packaging open-source products, "top of the article" CTA, and a good way to present integrations

Author

Jakub Czakon
October 21, 2023

Hey,

What do you get when you mix fish and pear? A Groupear 🍐;)

This week on the agenda:

  • Integrations section on Meilisearch homepage

  • How to price and package open-source products

  • "Top of the article" CTA on the blog from Eartlhy

  • + a few bonus links at the end

Let’s go!

🪧 Promo

I am launching the revamped Developer Marketing Examples on Product Hunt this Monday (23 October).

Hoping for a good discussion in the comments with more examples shared to drive additional engagement and fun convos.

And I’d love your support in there.

I’ll follow up with an email once it is live, ok?

Developer marketing insights

1. How to price and package open-source

Emily Omier is helping open-source startups with the business side of things. Recently came across her podcast ”The business of open-source”. Good stuff.

In this particular episode, she talked with passbolt founders about their experience pricing/packaging open-source.

tldr:

  • First, they built a community for their open-source product.

  • At some point subgroup of the community started reaching out and asking if there was a commercial version coming.

  • They talked to them to really understand why and what they would want to pay for. They asked them: “Why not just use the community version?”

  • They learned that the community edition was great for single-user productivity and collaboration within a single team.

  • But bigger organizations need scalability, compliance, SSO. And that the persona that needs this the most is admin. They sell to them.

  • They also warn OS founders not to commercialize too quickly. You will have 2 competing products with different roadmaps, metrics etc. And if you are still small this will slow you down by a lot.

  • And yes, your open-source edition is a competitor to your commercial product.

2. "Top of the article" CTA on the blog from Eartlhy

Need one more call-to-action idea for your dev tool blog?

How about starting an article with it?

Sounds weird but if done right it can work. Even with devs (or maybe especially with devs).

Earthly did and they are known for great dev-focused content.

Ok, so how does it work?

You start your article with a contextual call to action where you explain:

  • Who you are and what your product does

  • And how that is relevant to the content of the article

  • Link out to more product-focused pages, ideally relevant to content

And then you let people read.

Those who find the topic important will remember you and/or maybe click out to see more.

I like it. It's explicit, transparent, and actually noninvasive.

3. Integrations section on Meilisearch homepage

How to show integrations on your dev tool homepage?

Every dev tool needs to integrate with other libraries in the space.

And you want to show how well integrated with the ecosystem you are.

But you actually want to do a bit more than that.

You want devs to see how easy/flexible/clean it would be for them to use it.

That is why instead of showing just logos from your ecosystem it is good to show the code too.

Meilisearch does that beautifully:

  • They show a big list of integrations that show the breadth

  • For each, there is a code snippet on a relatable example

  • + call to action to all integrations and selected one

I am sure this is getting more clicks than just a list of logos.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me

  • I have a few slots every week for 60-min strategy sessions and longer-term advising. We can talk strategy, tactics, brainstorming, whatever you need right now. See how it works -> 

  • You can also promote your product/service/job in this newsletter. But I want to 100% make sure this will add value for the readers so… Let’s talk first ->

2. Join our Slack community

1100+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking about things like this:

3. Bonus links to check out

Join the conversation

or to participate.