Month June 2007

Open Source and SaaS – Business in the Fast Lane

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

It’s been an exciting two weeks with all the preparations for the Mindquarry GO launch and respective public relations.

I can now clearly sense how the combination of Open Source and Software as a Service (SaaS) dramatically accelerates our business.

We already get plenty of feedback from users who download our software and install it on their own – that’s the Open Source engine that keeps us optimizing our product. SaaS is the other turbo engine: registrations for free Mindquarry GO beta accounts are adding up and the first beta users will go live Monday. Once we have all 333 users online by September 9th, they will provide even more feedback and help us to rapidly improve our software.

As we try to consequently apply the mantra “release early, release often” to both our Open Source and SaaS offer, we multiply the effect of early user feedback leading towards a constantly enhanced product and hosted service.

Mindquarry GO Launched – Get 3 Beta Tester Accounts

Sandro Groganz 2 Comments

Go for Mindquarry GO 🙂 It’s the new online hosted collaboration service offered by Mindquarry, powered by our Open Source Web collaboration software.

You can now (continue to read below before you click) sign up for 333 free Mindquarry GO Beta accounts to work with a fully functional version of the Mindquarry GO offer for 3 months. It includes 100GB disc space for file sharing, unlimited teams, user, Wiki pages, tasks, etc. – no need to download, install, configure or troubleshoot.

I have 3 reserved accounts for the readers of my blog. Leave a comment and make sure you enter your email address. I’ll pick those who are in desperate need of a good collaboration tool 😉

With Mindquarry GO, we are joining the ranks of Open Source companies offering their products as Software as a Service (SaaS).

The Day Your Community Comes to Life

Sandro Groganz 3 Comments

A few days ago, it happened for the first time that someone outside of the Mindquarry team answered a question in the Mindquarry forum – that’s when a community starts to blossom.

Especially for an Open Source project, this is a magic moment, because community building is so crucial to its success.

Even though I have seen it before in other projects and companies, I am always astonished when I read in a forum about developers who give a new product a try with a lot of engagement and patience. It’s so great to have virtual strangers all around the globe seriously checking out and working with our product.

Thanks to all our forum participants, we deeply appreciate all your feedback!

PS: The best tool to start a community is still a forum or mailinglist.

The Long Tail of Open Source Marketing

Sandro Groganz 4 Comments

Almost done with reading Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail. Although the book mainly focuses on the CD, DVD, books market, the principles can be applied to Open Source marketing, i.e. marketing an Open Source product. (Read the book anyway, because you’ll learn about fundamental changes in today’s economics!)

Most notably, I like the distinction between traditional media as pre-filters and social media as post-filters:

As such, in Long Tail markets, the role of filter then shifts from gatekeeper to advisor. Rather than predicting taste, post-filters such as Google measure it. […] In general, blogs are shaping up to be a powerful source of influential recommendations.

What we do at Mindquarry, is a mix of both, traditional (pre-filter) and social (post-filter) marketing. Something like a beta release of our software will be pushed via blogs, while a PR about a stable release will be send out to traditional media.

The interesting thing about social media is that a e.g. a blog entry need not come out latest 1 day after the beta release. Because blogs are a lot about the blogger’s individual authority, it’s still worth writing about a beta release even 2 weeks after it has been released.

Post-filters have a longer span of attention compared to pre-filters. This allows you to plan the PR for a stable release in a way that you first finish the work for traditional media (e.g. writing the respective press release) and after the release announcement you have 1 or 2 days to prepare the bloggers pitch or review guide.

There is one important exception to this rule: If you plan to “leak” exclusive information to a blogger or traditional media, you of course provide that info to them in advance of all others.