There is no need to spend a fortune in marketing dollars to launch a new Open Source product. You can create substantial buzz with a low marketing budget to win your first customers.

The basic rules are:

1. Don’t think big, think smart: Acquire a bootsrapper’s state of mind.
2. Communicate early, communicate often: For every step of your software development and release process, think of a related small marketing initiative.

The good thing about Open Source software is that there is nothing to hide. You can inform the public and let it participate in your project from the second you had the idea of building it. The openness of the Open Source development model allows low budget micro-marketing on the internet to build an ecosystem with emerging sales leads even before the product is ready for production use.

The benefits of launching a product the Open Source Marketing way are:

• Less error-prone: Just like the OSS model allows developers to modify the software incrementally based on feedback from a growing community, so does it allow Open Source Marketing to adjust campaigns on-the-fly based on interactive communication.
• Immediate results: Instead of spending a lot of time upfront on developing an optimal marketing solution, incremental and satisficing steps allow to achieve immediate marketing results with a very basic product marketing strategy to start from.
• Risk reduction: An OSS company can gradually grow its marketing efforts from tiny initiatives focusing on a very specific and small audience to large-scale global media campaigns in parallel to a growing customer base and confidence through an adaptive marketing approach.

Here are some sample marketing actions, applicable on different stages of the product development life cycle:

1. You got an idea about a new OSS product? Why not discuss it on your blog right from the start and invite others to comment on your thoughts? Most likely, you will get some good input that will allow you to tweak your idea and save money on business consulting. Furthermore, you have planted the first seed for growing a community related to your upcoming product by attracting visionaries.
2. Get the product website ready a month or two before you make the source code available. Provide a registration form where everyone can subscribe and get notified once you publish the code. This is how you can collect leads. You can later turn the notification service into a newsletter where you inform about upcoming releases.
3. Make the source code available publicly ASAP. Even if you don’t think it’s ready for prime time yet (a perfectionist’s trap), get the software out there and continue developing it in SVN. There are plenty of great developers who enjoy trying out a cool new OSS product even in pre-alpha state. Maybe one of them will become a contributor and early adopter?
4. Of course, you will keep blogging about the progress of your development and business efforts to attract new community members and to increase loyalty of those already observing or participating in what you are doing.
5. It’s time for an alpha release. Create a blog about it, with brief general information about your product, including business benefits. If applicable, include some screenshots as well. Link to the installation documentation you wrote. Nicely ask some of your peers to blog about the release and to refer to your blog entry or the product website.
6. For the beta release, it might make sense to contact a PR or marketing agency (I heard of InitMarketing providing all sorts of OSS marketing services ) who help you to create some buzz in the blogosphere. Set up an invitation-only online demo which will allow you to collect some more leads. Include a screencast on the product website that explains what your software does and what it’s good for.

Once you have reached the beta release milestone, you might want to employ a marketing expert or outsource some marketing work to an agency. After the beta release you might start to charge for support, especially installation and configuration to companies who can afford that - make sure that you still help out those with related questions on the forum for free.

Additionally some early adopters might consider using your software in production based on their good impression of the beta release and once the stable version is out. These potential customers share your vision of the product and see the same business benefits as you do. They might pay you for standby support , consulting, customizing.

Inexpensive prosumer software and social media marketing tools allow you to decide for each task of a marketing action if you want to do it yourself or pay someone else to do it for you. The same choice that OSS customers can make between investing time (install, configure, extend yourself) or money (get support and services from the OSS vendor) is true for OSS companies marketing their product.

For example, do you want to create the product screencast yourself or have a marketing agency record it? Do you want to upload it to YouTube or run your own video streaming platform? This choice allows you to keep your marketing efforts for a product launch low at the beginning and to expand your marketing budget over time as revenue grows.

The InitMarketing team keeps growing. This time Andreas Heer from Switzerland joins us.

He is a great addition due to his strong background as a journalist of German-speaking newspapers and magazines in Switzerland. Andi is a board member of /ch/open, the Swiss Open Systems User Group. With Andi’s expertise, our Open Source marketing services can only become better.

Andi, great to have you on our team!

I am happy to announce the winner of the InitMarketing logo contest. We received 34 logo submissions and we would like to deeply thank everyone who participated. It was great to see the logos coming in since the very first days of the contest. Many of them are well thought out and we very much appreciate the time each of the participants invested to contribute their ideas.

And the winner is: “Orange Hit” of Wirawan Harianto.

Four out of five InitMarketing team members opted for the winner logo. We believe that it is a true iconographic representation of InitMarketing. In fact, the creator of the logo said it himself so well in his logo description.

Wirawan Harianto is currently a second year graphic design student in Sydney Graphics College, Australia, wanting to specialize in Web Design. He is an open-source enthusiast translating online documents of open source projects into his native language, which is Indonesian.

We will now develop our corporate design together with Wirawan, which will include:

• InitMarketing logo (enhancing the logotype)
• InitMarketing website
• InitMarketing business cards
• InitMarketing letterhead

Following the open source tradition, we make our corporate design efforts public and welcome everyone to contribute with feedback, starting with the logo’s first revision.

It would not be too far fetched to talk about some of Microsoft’s PR talk related to Open Source as driven by a burned lands strategy in the past years.

Let’s leave the past behind. Let’s assume that Microsoft is seriously concerned about interoperability and openness. Let’s assume they are trying to understand how the Open Source business works and want to engage with Open Source companies in a friendly manner. Let’s not discuss whether Microsoft opens their APIs due to a self-decided business strategy or whether the EU made them make the decision.

Let’s give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt.

To understand the position Microsoft is in from a marketing communications perspective, take a look at the following analogy: Imagine a country that invaded a foreign land and actually burned the lands to defeat its inhabitants, but without military success. The invaded country was able to defend itself and won the war. Imagine business men of the aggressor country coming back one year after the war trying to establish business relationships.

As a citizen of the invaded country - would you trust those business men?

I can imagine that those Microsoft employees who by their corporate role and conviction sincerely want to establish mutually beneficial relationships with Open Source companies and communities face mistrust. They are often being accused of the “old crimes” and are being seen as the enemy.

As of today, Microsoft is in the middle of constant crisis management with Open Source. To get out of it, it seems Microsoft is rightly entering an era of diplomacy and friendly (naturally somewhat unclear) statements which are supposed to help grow trust between Microsoft and the Open Source community. This effort of small and large steps will have to balance naysayers as well as yaysayers to produce realistic results. Hence, it will be important for Microsoft to stay focused and committed.

While at the Microsoft Open Source ISV Forum and OSBC, one could witness Microsoft’s diplomacy at work:

• “Open Source is here to stay”, said Sam Ramji at the OSS ISV forum and Brad Smith mentioned during his keynote at OSBC: “We at Microsoft appreciate the important role that Open Source plays.”

• During his OSBC keynote, Brad Smith eloquently apologized for Bill Gates and Steve Balmer once calling Open Source communism and cancer: “Ultimately, people are not caricatures. They get up in the morning. They get smarter. The industry evolves. And you want that. You don’t want people to have to live with the caricatures and stay with those caricatures.”

Even to Microsoft, Open Source has proven to be a viable and lucrative business – why else would they partner with Open Source vendors? From there, it is just one more step for Microsoft to adopt Open Source business strategies themselves for relevant products or parts of them.

With Microsoft being a company relying on partners for 96% of its revenues, it will be highly important to drive innovation by building its partner network not only on top of commercial interests and proprietary software, but also on merit and fame for great software development achievements - a huge benefit of Open Source communities.

Microsoft needs to leave behind the scorched earth policies that clearly don’t work. Microsoft’s top executives need to re-state and re-assure that they want to live in peaceful coexistence and cooperation with Open Source. Most of all, Microsoft will have to accept that patent gimmicks won’t get them anywhere in their quest to play nicely with the Open Source community.

Otherwise, Microsoft will continue to cripple itself when it comes to additional strategic business options available with Open Source – not being able to apply OSS business strategies to some of their own products or growing cooperation with OSS vendors and projects. The intended acquisition of Yahoo! will be ill-fated without Microsoft successfully building a good relationship with the Open Source community, given that prominent community members such as PHP’s Rasmus Lerdorf are key to Yahoo!’s success.

The goal for Microsoft is to get past the point where they rely on the Open Source community giving them the benefit of the doubt and instead leverage the potentials of Open Source to Microsoft’s own advantage based on trustful relationships with the cathedrals and the bazaars.

As of today, Vikram will join the InitMarketing team and run the InitMarketing office in Bombay, Maharashtra India. He is an experienced technical writer who already published several LAMP books and contributed articles to various developer zones such as IBM developerWorks and Zend devzone. Furthermore, Vikram has an MBA from Oxford University and thus blends technological expertise with business know-how.

I am very happy to welcome Vikram on board, especially because now InitMarketing can provide better marketing support to the emerging Open Source market in India.

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!

At Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) next week, Brad Smith, general counsel for Microsoft, will keynote the event. A panel and the audience will be able to ask him questions right after his presentation.

InitMarketing fellow Stephen Walli blogged some questions he would like to see raised and I set up an area where everyone can post questions and vote as well as comment on suggested questions: What would YOU ask Brad Smith at OSBC?

The deadline for submitting your take on a logo for my Open Source marketing consultancy is approaching quickly, being March 31st.

Several nice logos have already been submitted:

You got a better idea? Submit an InitMarketing logo and win an iPod touch (32GB) plus $50 iTunes gift card.

Feel free to rate and comment submitted logos.

Wolfgang Maass contacted me and asked if I would like to join the board of experts of an EU project they are going to propose. They are actually also looking for Open Source CMS companies (vendors or system integrators) who would like to join as a partner.

The EU project proposal entitled „Interactive Knowledge“ is currently being developed by a consortium which is led by Salzburg Research. The objective is to develop a “next generation semantic content management framework” based on existing frameworks, but with significant technological improvements ranging from RDF-storage to easy definition of workflows and business rules, and to dynamically re-configurable web interfaces.

Some more info on the objectives in Wolfgang’s words:

Our experience is that many smaller content management solution providers find it hard to make full use of the new standards such as RDF and CSS 3.0 when it comes to keeping solutions maintainable, re-usable or when it comes to cross-media publishing on mobile and other platforms. Increasingly, content management needs to interface with the “Internet of things”, e.g. you can get additional health information about a certain food product, by entering the retail store’s product code into a web-based content management system or into your mobile PA.

This is what the „Interactive Knowledge“ EU project will offer:

• 50 smaller CMS companies can become early adopters (small grants of up to 12.000 Euro are possible)
• 7 European SMEs who have content management systems will be offered to become full partners in this project and act as requirements experts as well as getting their own frameworks benchmarked with respect to their semantic capabilities. There are budgets between 80.000 and 200.000 Euro available, at a funding rate of 75%.

So, the „Interactive Knowledge“ EU project proposal is an excellent opportunity to benefit from a large scale R&D effort.

I know Wolfgang for quite some time and he told me that the project administrators have a very good track record in this type of project, are experts in the field and can assist with the administrative entry hurdles. This is good, because it will avoid that the EU bureaucracy and lazy project partners will eat up your valuable resources. I know how important this is because I have experience as a work package leader on behalf of eZ Systems of the successfully finished tOSSad EU project.

If you are interested, please send an email to wolfgang dot maass at hs-furtwangen dot de no later than this Thursday, March 20th, 2008.

See you at the kick-off meeting after the EU accepted the proposal

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.