For the launch of Jahia United Content Bus, InitMarketing has created a video explaining the concept. Hope you like it as much as I do.

It’s been very quiet on my blog lately due to the fact that I was very busy with working for InitMarketing customers and in parallel brought InitMarketing to the next level.

InitMarketing is now 15 months old and keeps growing at a steady pace, not too fast and not too slow. I have recently added four more customer references to our Web site: IKS Project, OXID eSales, Jahia, todoyu.

My workload grew up to a point where I realized that I should do my first hire. Effective May 1st, a person in the U.S. started to work full time for InitMarketing. He is currently in probation and things look good. It’s a great relief for me to be able to transfer undone tasks at the end of my work day to the U.S. and receive finished deliverables when I start again my next work day. Of course, he’ll gradually start to manage customer projects himself and will also do sales to expand our customer base in the USA.

Ultimately, I can spend more time with my family now, especially with my little daughter. As much as I enjoy working for my customers and building InitMarketing, I don’t want to miss out on actively experiencing my daughter’s childhood.

Right from the start, I had a very good feeling concerning InitMarketing. I quickly realized from the feedback I got that I focused on the right niche at the right time. Today, things go together well once more. There are two people wthin InitMarketing who are interested in a partnership. We are currently investigating in setting up either a company with limited liability (GmbH) or a private stock company (AG) in Germany. The latter would better fit with the Open Source spirit of InitMarketing, where “credit where credits are due” would translate into “allot shares where shares are due”.

We’ll have our second child around August/September, hence I am happy to see today that InitMarketing is doing well; that others are happy to take responsibility and build the business together with me; that people are proud to work full time for InitMarketing; that the team of freelancers within InitMarketing is highly professional and knowledgeable. This all gives me the ability to support my family in a few months without sacrificing the quality of marketing services that InitMarketing customers expect.

Work-life balance at its best - but you’ll have to work hard to achieve it

I am very happy to welcome two great additions to the InitMarketing team:

Zak Greant is a good friend of mine, hence I am particularly happy to have him on board. Zak has solid experience building and managing online communities, developing electronic frontier business strategies and working with Free Software and Open Source licenses. For example, he had worked as MySQL’s community advocate and for the Mozilla Foundation.

I only recently met Dave Neary at OSBC and was deeply impressed by his understanding of the dynamics of consensus-based communities, and intimate knowledge of the concerns of businesses engaging with free software projects. Dave has served three terms as a member of the board of directors of the GNOME Foundation (2005 - 07) and was a developer and release manager of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) from 1999 until 2006.

Stefan Probst just recently joined the InitMarketing team. He formerly directed SUSE R&D efforts at Novell and thus has intimate knowledge about Open Source development processes. With this expertise, Stefan is able to support our customers in setting up or optimizing development methods that are in sync with community building efforts.

Now playing on InitMarketing.tv is a video interview with Bryan, who is Director of Open Source Strategy at Microsoft. I very much respect Bryan as a person and for what he says in the interview. His answers show that he is truly committed and understands the benefits well. Some excerpts:

So it’s really a noticeable trend where open source is clearly a part of the data centre in the IT environment. There are Microsoft technologies that are clearly a part of this.

The trend in the overall market, what we see and hear, all points to pragmatic, case-by-case evaluation of what meets customer needs, how do you combine things in interesting ways, and if you believe that open source has value, that shouldn’t really surprise you, that should just make sense.

Above video only shows the highlights. You can also watch or read the full interview with Bryan.

I am very happy to announce that Florian Effenberger of OpenOffice.org fame joined our team of Open Source marketing experts at InitMarketing.

Florian brings in a lot of experience in community building and he already helps our customers with related work.

Welcome Florian, it’s a pleasure to have you on board!

Open Source Business Foundation (OSBF) yesterday announced the winners of the Open Source Business Award. Two InitMarketing customers won prizes: todoyu won the 3rd prize (10k EUR) and OXID eSales shared the 1st prize (receiving 32.5k EUR).

OSBF annually awards innovative ideas, thought through concepts and promising business plans with the Open Source Business Award. It is being granted for innovative business ideas based on Open Source Software, which revolutionize the market and can set new standards.

Heise reports about the award in detail (German only).

2008 was an exciting and very successful year.

I officially started my own business in February: InitMarketing, the open source marketing company. Ever since then, the InitMarketing customer base keeps growing. As of today, there are 15 paying customers including open source software vendors and associations, ranging from content management systems, e-shops to Linux distributions, from mega corporations to small start-ups. Some of them are in the FOSS business for several years, others recently started or even open sourced their formerly proprietary product. InitMarketing helped them with marketing strategy definition, community building, public relations, blog coaching, event management, creating product brochures, writing case studies and white papers and much more.

Revenues for 2008 clearly exceeded my expectations. We have been contracted for project-specific work as well as on a retainer basis. A good part of that money went to InitMarketing’s team members who have done an excellent job helping out with their special expertise on customer projects.

I am particularly proud of InitMarketing.tv, because it is first of all a lot of fun to record the video interviews about Open Source marketing. Second, the videos provide real value to those who watch them much in the spirit of Open Source communites where expertise is being shared happily. Furthermore, video recording and editing has turned into a passion and I very much enjoy extending my prosumer skills.

The goals for InitMarketing in 2009 are to double our revenues, but given the world-wide economic downturn, I am clueless if we can make it. Honestly, I wish that those claims about Open Source software doing better during a recession turn out to be true. So far, I don’t have any reasons to not believe that this self-fullilling prophecy will fullfill itself.

There are positive signs: none of our customers face any economic problems yet. Some of them even performed better than projected during the second half of 2008 … but - you know - only the paranoid survive.

Given the overall economic climate and the general bad financial situation of the U.S., I don’t want to be overly optimistic. Nevertheless, the advantages of open source software over proprietary software in times of tight budgets are obvious. The only real problem are completely cut-down budgets…

Anyway, I wish you all a 2009 that can only become better than expected, right?

I just published a video interview with Stormy which I recorded at OSiM in Berlin.

A video interview with Boris Kraft, CTO Magnolia, the Simple Open Source Content Management System, just got published on InitMarketing.tv. Boris discusses various aspects of marketing Magnolia.

Here’s an excerpt of the part I find most interesting:

Question: You’re building up the Magnolia office in New York. Is there a difference you realized between how to market your open source product in Europe compared to the US?

Boris Kraft: I think there are many differences. The expectations are different in the US, there are all these images we have in our heads about how the US economy works, about how the consumers are, and a lot of that is actually true. It’s much more hype, marketing is very very important, and the whole process is very fast, so it’s much more hype than substance - that’s my experience so far. So, coming from an European country - like Magnolia International sitting in Switzerland - this is a part where we typically have a very thoughtful way of doing things. We like to produce quality, and it takes longer, this is very difficult for us to deal with: To have this “Swiss mind set” and come to the US and basically clash with the “US mind set”. I kind of have to be there and say “we are the best, we are the greatest, we have everything tomorrow” whereas here we would say “yes, well, actually we can do this, yes” - you know, it’s a very different perception…

You can watch the interview highlights (4:44), the full interview (12:38), or read the transcript of the full interview.