Thoughts On Go To Market For Modern Software Infrastructure

High Level Market Changes

To kick things off, I think it’s important to talk about a few high level trends that have really changed buying behavior in recent years. These shifts have required a relatively deep re-thinking of product marketing, and require throwing out a good bit of historical wisdom. The marketing role has changed a lot more generally (become much more scientific and metrics driven), but we’ll stick to product marketing for this doc.

Fundamentally, I think the changes outlined below are the result of a combination of the internet + a generational change in middle management, and mostly boil down to the fact that people just do not want to be “sold to” in the traditional sense anymore. I have seen a lot of startups hire reps that come from legacy companies like Oracle, and I don’t think many of them fully appreciate the changes below. I have seen firsthand how painful that ends up being on their ability to sell, and many of them end up churning out relatively quickly.

The key changes are:

• People Will Self Educate — Whether it’s purchasing consumer products from Amazon or software from a vendor, buying behavior has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. Consider even a large purchase, like buying a car. 15 years ago you would go to the dealership and ask someone to walk you through options, get a brochure, etc. Today, you would likely do all of your research online (read reviews, look at options) and come in for a test drive + to get the last 10% of your questions around the particular add ons answered. By the time you go to the dealer, you more or less know you want to buy the car. Software purchasing is very much the same, especially when selling to engineers.
• The Market Is Much More Crowded And Competitive — Because of the influx of available venture capital in recent years, the infrastructure market has become much, much more crowded. Getting noticed has become much more difficult, and it takes a lot more creativity to cut through the noise.
• You Have To Deposition Cloud Vendors — This is a battle you will fight for forever. Because teams often have budgets allocated to general AWS spend, it means that it does not require budget approval to buy Simple Workflow Service. This makes the Amazon/Azure/GCP services the path of least resistance. Leveraging the Amazon/Azure/GCP marketplaces is one way to combat this, as it allows customers to use their existing AWS/Azure/GCP budget to buy your product. You also have to make sure your licensing is in order so that Amazon does not offer a managed service version of your product.
• Sales Are Often Champion And Community Led — Product Marketing for Open Source software is notoriously difficult and really unlike any other sector. Because your buyer is usually both analytical and well informed (and you have a free option), marketing open source is fundamentally different from marketing productivity/SaaS/traditional closed source software. It is often (though not always) the case that a company is already using your product in some capacity when a buying conversation begins, so you need to focus on arming the champion (developer) with the tools they need to make the case to their boss that a purchase makes sense. This champion enablement is critical for moving from the “bottom” to the “middle” and eventually the “enterprise”.

A Framework For Understanding Personas

Much like product development, the first thing to understand in product marketing is the relevant personas. In product development, your fundamental goal is to build features that resonate with a user need. In product marketing, your fundamental goal is to build a message that resonates with a buyer need. These are sometimes one in the same, but often they are different.

In the case of open source, there are three key personas to keep in mind:

“Bottom” (Individual Developers)

Cares About: Usability, community, stability, “street cred” with their friends for using the cool new tool, and product support.

Engages Through: Documentation, Slack, Hackernews, Meetups, their friends.

Risk Tolerance: High. Often wants to work with the newest and coolest technology, and is willing to take a bit more risl.

Budget Power: Low to none.

“Middle” (Directors/VPs)

Cares About: Operational efficiency, performance, stability (less outages), and making a name for themselves to their boss.

Engages Through: Your website, inside sales representatives, recorded videos from events, a champion developer in their org.

Risk Tolerance: Medium. Has to take product risk into account, but sees opportunity to improve their team and advance their career.

Budget Power: Medium, though sometimes requires approval depending on organization.

“Top” (Procurement/CIO)

Cares About: They care about all the checkboxes, security, compliance, and adherence to company policies (does it integrate with X).

Engages Through: Outside Sales representatives, sales enablement materials.

Risk Tolerance: Varies depending on organization, but generally low. Usually making a large buying decision and big standardization across the org, so the product really needs to work.

Budget Power: Very high.

The Goal Of Product Marketing: Clarity and Trust

The overarching goal of product marketing is to build clarity and trust.

It is not to try and sell a product, over promise, or use buzz words to drive website traffic. Website traffic, like Github stars, is a vanity metric that indicates passive interest rather than active engagement. The goal is not eyeballs, it’s downloads and efficient sales. Claiming a product can do things that it can’t will just result in wasted time for your sales team and a poor customer experience overall. Similarly, painting too broad a picture (even if true) of a product’s use cases will just muddle sales conversations and make ramping salespeople super painful. It may seem like narrowing use cases will hurt sales, but it will actually help them. A sales team is not going to understand the product in the depth that you do, so it’s important to narrow things down into a repeatable process.

With all of this in mind, the goal of product marketing should be to provide customers with the tools they need to understand what your product is and why they should trust it. Customers should be able to self educate and quickly come up to speed on whether or not your product is a right fit without the need to interact with a member of the sales team. If it is a good fit, they should feel like you are an organization they can trust to deliver.

There are many nuances to this, but in my opinion the five most important things to define are:

Who It Is For: This is incredibly important. A user should be able to come to your website and immediately identify if the tool is for them or not. The simpler this message is, the better. It can be tempting to spin your tool as something that helps folks in many types of roles (and it might be true), but that often just creates more confusion and hurts more than helps. Pick your core user, and go from there. Figma is an excellent example of this — the tool ends up being used by numerous roles (Product, Eng, etc.), but the messaging is designer, designer, designer.

Another great example is Retool: “Build Internal Tools Fast”. It allows the viewer to answer a simple question: Do I need to build internal tools? The answer is often “yes!”. Conversely, the answer to “Do you need a low code app builder?” would probably be a shrug. It is too vague, and forces the user to think about what they would use an app for. Most people won’t do that thinking.

What it Is: Clearly defining the use cases that are a good fit for your product.

What It Is Not: Clearly defining the use cases that are not a good fit for your product.

The Pain It Alleviates: If the use cases are a good fit, defining this product makes the customer’s life less painful/stressful/annoying.

The Use Cases It Solves: Provide abstract use cases to help customers wrap their head around things.

Concrete Examples: Give concrete case studies and examples that prove your product works and the pain that it saved those customers.

The Strategic Key For Early Open Source/Freemium: Targeting Middle Managers

The demographic you target with your product marketing will change dramatically as you grow, but it’s my opinion that the key to success in open source product marketing at the medium-early stage (i.e. after you have developed a solid community and have good developer awareness) is to go after middle management. This generally looks like Directors and VP’s of Engineering. These are people that have enough power to purchase software for their team or group, but not so much power that they can buy an ELA for the product or mandate that the entire organization standardize on it. Middle managers are the “team” portion of the Developer → Team → Enterprise model of open source expansion.

Developers will read your documentation, and enterprises will speak to your outside sales people directly. The goal of product marketing should be to attack the middle group that doesn’t make economic sense to attack with an outside sales team (given their contract sizes), and probably doesn’t want to engage with a high touch sales process anyhow. They are the Goldilocks “just right” group for your product marketing — not so big that they need in-person/high touch service, not so small that they don’t have buying power. Because open source companies have strong developer DNA internally, the value of marketing to this group is often missed, but it is critically important. Open source success is largely predicated on a land and expand strategy (average lands look something like $30k), and middle managers are almost always where you land.

As such, the key is to create a product marketing strategy that:

1. Allows Middle Managers to self educate with minimal sales interaction.
2. Provides your developer champion the tools they need to make their case to their boss in the event that said boss does not wish to educate themselves.

Following this strategy allows customers to educate themselves fully before they approach your team for a sale. Like the car analogy, the customer may have a few questions they would like clarification on before buying, but these questions can often be served by a small, inexpensive inside sales team rather than requiring the heavy lift of an outbound AE + SE combo. This makes for an incredibly efficient sales motion, and is why product led and open source companies are so resilient to economic shifts like the one we are currently living through.