I came across two good blog post this morning that reminded me about the first principles of marketing and community building for an open source project.
Adventures in Open Source makes the point that for an open source project to be successful to has to be ‘extremely useful‘ and ‘never suck‘.
Principle #1: To build a community you need code and needs to be good.
Stephen O’Grady from RedMonk makes a very very important point in ‘Triangulating for Success‘. Marketing and PR types are always trying to get ‘key influencers’ to use and/or talk about their product/project. However, these key influences are actually listening to what people are telling them.
Principle #2: You need to have passionate/vocal users in your community. They are key to making it grow.
In many ways, these sound very obvious and in fact they are but I think it is worth a reminder. The equation is pretty simple: Great technology + Passionate Users = A Growing Community.
A good case study is the Mylar community. Mik and the Mylar community have built great technology and they certainly appear passionate. Which is why it is gaining substantial growth.
