My former appreciated boss at Mindquarry started to offer his business know-how as an independent consultant for software companies in Germany: Stephan Voigt was CEO at Mindquarry and I always enjoyed working with him while being the VP Marketing there.

Stephan offers consulting services such as:

• interim CEO/COO
• marketing strategy consulting
• sales concepts and execution
• investor relations
• and more

His focus is not on Open Source software only, but of course he has expertise in that area.

All the best for your business, Stephan!

I will be flying to San Francisco at March 23rd for Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), which takes place March 25th and 26th. Prior to OSBC, I will attend the second annual Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum at March 24th. I will fly back to Germany March 27th.

Please get in touch with me if you would like to meet.

Through our Open Source marketing consultancy, Stephe and I are currently in contact with Microsoft evaluating how we might help them with marketing their NXT partner program geared towards Open Source ISVs.

Very recently, Microsoft’s OSS partner program has been heavily criticized by Mary Jo Foley and Matt Asay (in reply, Stephe provides background information). Furthermore, the credo of InitMarketing is: “If you are Open Source, we will help you succeed”. Our corporate mission is to foster the success of Open Source in general.

Our first major concern was: Would an engagement with Microsoft foster the success of Open Source as far as their partner program is concerned? Could InitMarketing live up to its claim?

While Microsoft’s flagship products are not open source software, if InitMarketing helps open source ISVs to optimize their interoperability with Windows through the Microsoft partner program, then this will benefit Open Source vendors, opening up access to new customers and a higher distribution of their OSS products. From that standpoint, I believe InitMarketing can live up to its claim.

Our second major concern was that we might sacrifice InitMarketing’s yet young and innocent reputation as a trustful actor in the Open Source domain. To tackle this problem, we proposed to Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab and ISV team to make our work highly transparent to the Open Source community.

Microsoft supports us working in this transparent manner.

The benefits of open communication around the NXT program are clear for everyone involved:

• InitMarketing can establish itself as a neutral facilitator.
• The Microsoft ISV team can understand better the concerns of the open source community in general and ISVs in particular and gets valuable feedback which helps to improve the NXT program.
• By having InitMarketing communicate in the Open Source style (= transparently), it raises trust in the NXT program in the broader context of Microsoft messaging.

We feel very comfortable entering this sort of working relationship with Microsoft. We still value your feedback: Would you do Open Source marketing for Microsoft?, asks Stephe - please let him know your comments.

Drop me a line should you also be at OSMB congress in Nuremberg, Germany. I’ll be there at January 22nd only. Looking forward to seeing you there!

The meritocratic style of Open Source communities can irritate those who simply want to make a deal to raise their own productivity (so-called pragmatists). Highly community-driven projects without at least one strong corporate leader provide too many options frustrating especially those pragmatic buyers who are willing to spend good money for the best services.

A community without one ore more strong companies is in danger to alienate pragmatists who don’t want to invest time to become part of that community to later trade merit, but instead want to invest money to benefit immediately from the expertise hidden inside the community. For highly community-driven projects, crossing the chasm also means trading merit for money and building at least one strong corporation to provide the buying experience pragmatists expect (i.e. the whole product).

For example, Drupal is still a largely community-driven Open Source CMS project without a strong company taking the place of the cathedral in the bazaar. Where could a potential pragmatic customer turn to if in search for the one and only Drupal service provider with the best expertise, longest and most successful in-market track record and offices around the globe?

In fact, things are changing when it comes to Drupal: Acquia sets out to become for Drupal what MySQL is for MySQL. Chances are good they will succeed, given their team and $7 Million VC financing. This means that Drupal can finally line up with those Open Source competitors who are Open Source CMS vendors providing enterprise-grade services, such as Magnolia, Alfresco, eZ Systems.

Interestingly, Joomla! (formerly known as the CMS called Mambo) has gone the opposite way by cutting off the one malicious corporate head and letting a thousand small heads grow. It remains to be seen if this puts Joomla! into a good position given the long march towards consolidation in the CMS market. Same goes for Plone, now a true democratic community.

Pragmatic customers want to buy the best from the best. They appreciate simple choices and distinct correlations between a product and a company - even if they just want to turn towards that company to check out which other companies provide similar services (e.g. partner companies).

In other words: Pragmatists don’t want to search whom they need to talk to. They need a point of reference, even if it is just for comparison sake. Allow me a pointed remark: A “secret society” of community members or a multitude of small companies scares pragmatists away if that’s the only way how they can get an Open Source product up and running.

Find more Open Source marketing articles in my Wiki.

Due to solid demand, I will officially start my own business offering marketing consulting services to Open Source software creators and contributors in February. Clients will be able to choose from a broad range of marketing services, including strategic as well as operational tasks and social media as well as traditional marketing.

The mission is to help companies and organizations behind Open Source projects become more visible and profitable, hence to boost adoption of Open Source. The only criteria is that a client contributes to Open Source software development, which makes up for the following types of potential customers:

• Creators: Vendors of Open Source products
• Contributors: Companies offering proprietary software including Open Source components they contribute to
• Investors: VCs financing an Open Source venture

The consultancy will be able to help with:

• Defining an Open Source marketing strategy
• Open Source communications coaching of management
• Branding and positioning
• Community building/maintenance
• Building/maintaining a partner network crediting Open Source contributions
• Public relations (printed magazines, blogosphere, …)
• Collaterals (brochures, business cards, …)
• Events (e.g. (un-)conferences, partner meetings, …)
• Investor pitches
• Managing the contents of a client’s Web site
• Social media: creating product Screencasts, coaching bloggers, …
• …

One could completely outsource all marketing activities to the consultancy or take it in for specific projects or campaigns only.

I’ll be happy to share my experiences in this Weblog with you along the way and I will continue to provide general Open Source marketing know-how distilled from client projects to the public.

I’d also be happy to hear your advice.

Entrepreneurs are exposed to hubris and heart attack. Below mantras should help to gain back a calm state of mind. Read minimum twice per day (and thanks for raising my page view statistics).

You are not a genius!

Got the feeling that things only get done well if you do them yourself? That only you strive for perfection and others don’t care enough? Relax! First, there are so many chaotic companies out there who make a lot of money. Second, human beings are never perfect, not even you!

Don’t do it for money!

Your VCs scare the hell out of you and you do everything they ask you to do? Stop it! You did not start your business because of money, but because of a vision (make the world a better place or help yourself to afford living in a better place). In the end, it’s you who started it all, it will be your failure or success and that’s just fair.

You don’t own it!

You think you know exactly how your product should look like and you hate when others don’t get it? Let loose! Business success has a lot to do with not being selfish. If your product is a success, the whole world owns it (given a best case scenario). Everyone will buy it (again, best case scenario), because it helps them in their daily life. Listen to potential customers from the early days, because they might want to own your product.

If you take these mantras seriously, you will feel like a sociable genius, soon-to-be rich entrepreneur, and you will be proud of the company you own. Now, read again!

About 6 years ago I quit my studies and started to regularly earn money. I did quite a few different things: from running my own business to being employed, from software development to marketing.

Experiences I’ve made were good and bad, but mostly good, hence I almost always enjoyed what I did. Whenever terrible things happened, I realized that in the end, all you can do is to keep trusting others.

Of course, I became more aware of what can go wrong and I became more picky on whom to trust and also to which extend. But what it all comes down to is that you cannot be happy in your work life if you refuse to trust and instead become skeptical and bitter.

Those who do not trust, they are quite easy to spot: They take all the fame for themselves and blame others. They are extremely nice to their boss and behave ugly to their subordinates. They are always under pressure and make others feel nervous.

Those who don’t trust others, don’t trust themselves and lack confidence in their own and other people’s abilities. This prevents those without trust from achieving successful results.

While reading Lean Solutions (thanks Judith!), I came across this paragraph:

And the one thing we can conclude for certain, based on our years of observing faulty processes, is that if you drop good people into a bad process you quickly end up with a lot of “bad” people assigning blame to each other.

I have experienced this phenomena of teams gone bad myself several times while being employed or working on the spot with customers and observing their corporate culture.

Here are some symptoms:

• Political games or bullying kill creativity and the ability to concentrate
• Others think about others that they are incompetent
• … and truly incompetent people do not get fired
• No one speaks the truth and real conflicts are being avoided
• Emotions are being classified as unprofessional

It all comes down to a company not capable or interested in optimizing its processes, which is effectively the same as not respecting each employee’s motivation for doing a great job. This is where a lot of frustration erodes the company’s business potentials.

Japanese car producers have shown that tightly structured work processes are not the domain of Germans only :). Optimized processes are key to success. Monopolists can afford to be chaotic - but there will come the day where a competitor with much better processes will seriously attack the monopolist.

Breaking the spell of an inefficient work environment is actually simple, yet it starts with the behavior of each individual person in the company. Hence, it requires courage:

• Speak for yourself, practice radical honesty, say how you feel
• Don’t hold back just because others might not like what you are saying

Being good to yourself does not mean that you disrespect others or that you are a trouble maker. Quite the opposite, this is actually the best way how to show respect, because by being honest and straight forward, everyone else has the chance to react upon what you are saying (even if it means that you might realize you are wrong and act like an idiot - we are all human…).

Well, of course, if you realize that the company is still not good to you, then you’ll have to leave.

Once, each employee feels taken serious and is able to express himself, business issues instead of personal fights will regain attention. Only by clearly addressing conflicts, there’s a chance that business processes can be optimized. Conflict resolution is key to business process optimization and to support teams in striving for a common goal.

I attended the panel discussion entitled “The Open Source Promise” at Red Herring Spring 2007 yesterday. Here are the aspects I found most interesting:

Marriage of SaaS and Open Source

Most of the panelists do a mixture of traditional Open Source model (software + services) and Software as a Service (SaaS). Seems like this becomes the mainstream business model for Open Source products that are useful for end users/consumers. At Mindquarry, we’ll offer a hosted solution of our Open Source product as well.

Ranga Rangachari (Groundwork Open Source) sees a general move away from the typical use of self-hosted Open Source software within enterprises towards SaaS.

Bill Soward (Adaptive Planning) described that there’s a successful path for lead generation from those who download and try out the freely available Open Source product and then simply buy a subscription for the SaaS offering to use it in production.

Bob Walters (Untangle) made a highly interesting general comment on the “marriage of Open Source and SaaS”: The central issue here is that e.g. a (the?) major SaaS provider, Google, made several great improvements to the Linux kernel but does not give them back to the community. Here, SaaS works against the community spirit of Open Source. GPL v3 is supposed to help avoid this issue.

Community is your main business

Bob Walters made a good point in saying if you miss attracting a developers community, you miss 75% of your business.

Linux will win the mobile market

Dells recent announcement to ship their computers packaged with Ubuntu lead to the question of Linux on the desktop. Michael Sikorsky (Cambrian House Inc.) stated that Linux will definitely win the mobile market, even if it won’t make it on the desktop.

How to provide support for all Linux distributions

Mike Guiterman (SourceFire, the company behind Snort) made a general comment on what the diversity of available Linux distributions means to his Open Source company: They make sure that their product supports the main distributions and have the community provide solutions and services for all other.