Heya Johs, I’m not sure CouchDB is in a place to follow your suggestion, and I’m not entirely certain it ever will, or should.
There is an emerging consensus around 3.0 being 2.0+HTTP2. 4.0 will be 3.0+one-major-feature and so on. Which is a nice upgrade cadence and we should have the appropriate marketing work done to go along with that, but I don’t think it puts us into a position to reverse the way we think about CouchDB releases. In a way, this is like “the big rewrite” vs. incremental updates of software development. The big rewrite practically never pans out, and I think it’ll be the same with a similarly approached marketing approach to CouchDB. I think going forward, we should continue to hone the message we have and where we use it in our marketing materials. What’s on the 2.0 website practically has been developed by Noah Slater and myself (on this list, so plenty of input of course), three/four years ago. So there is still a lot we can do to reach 2016 :) * * * For a strategy, I think we can keep it very simple. CouchDB has one defining feature and there are reasons for people who could make use of that feature and decide against CouchDB for one reason or another. Our job should be to remove as many of these reasons as we can while staying true to CouchDB and the environment it lives in (e.g. in 2007 SpiderMonkey was the obvious tech choice for JavaScript, in 2016 it isn’t any more). From that rather well defined vantage point, we just have to put in the work to cover our ground. As an example: one of the reasons people use the web framework Ionic with PouchDB or LocalForage is because they the only two storage solutions that are mentioned in any useful tutorials. That would be an easy win for us. Another angle: people think CouchDB is dead and don’t know what important things it enables (The Ebola Story, npm, Cloudant, etc.) and doing short, targeted case-studies for all those ways people use CouchDB is conceptually really simple, we just need to sit down and do it. And there are countless other initiatives we could be doing (already, I might add). Now, to help us decide *what* to do *when* we definitely need to do some marketing ground work: like defining key personas that we want to reach (the dev, the CTO, etc.) and nail down their needs and fears and then we can figure out how to address them with our marketing efforts. And do this one by one, iteratively. As for competition, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass. I think we have a good handle on who the competition is and what makes sense for the project to do on a technical level to get to where we feel we have a good competition story (cluster rebalance, improved query lang, perf e.g.), but aside from that, I don’t think there is a need to go beyond any of that. I’d rather spent time on working out the kinks on the story and tech of the use-cases that replication enables, which is as wide as “from BigData to Mobile”, and I still think, after nearly 10 years, that this is a really strong and compelling value proposition, we just need to deliver on it. Best Jan -- > On 28 Sep 2016, at 07:46, Johs Ensby <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, > > I appologise for a long intro about myself, feel free to skip it. > Also feel free to skip to the bottom of this long mail to the suggestions. > > I have worked with B2B marketing since 1983 when computer graphics > sidetracked me from architecture and design that was my original education > from https://aho.no/en <https://aho.no/en>. > Doing over 2000 corporate presentations and board room presentations I got a > lot of experience with corporate decision making. > I took an MBA at http://www.bi.edu/ <http://www.bi.edu/> before starting with > web development in 1995, but learned close to nothing about B2B marketing > there. I got a good update from this guy later, though > http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6521&click=sidebar > <http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/profile.aspx?facId=6521&click=sidebar> > That was I decided to started using CouchDB after visiting the Cloudant team > when they were a startup. I thought CouchDB was fantastic having worked with > .asp and mySQL. > All my carreer, I have worked with tech people at the client side. > Marketing-wise they to the same mistakes over and over again. I don't say > this out of disrespect, I respect tech developers, including software > devlopers very much. It just doesn't change the fact that they usually don't > know much about marketing. > > The #1 misconception about tech marketing is: > Marketing = promotion ("I have made this great thing, not you marketing > people push it into the market for me") > > Marketing is about doing it the other way around. When marketing is > introduced in text books it is often described as the third step in the > development of mass production > The Production concept was about mass production trying to keep up with demand > The Sales concept was about creating demand for what already was being > produced > The Marketing concept starts with customer needs and targets value creation > for a specific customer segment. Communications theory and mass media > replaced the door-to-door salesmen by putting ideas about companies and > products into the head of people instead of coldcalling and hardselling > features. > Consumer marketing left #1 ad 2 for the 3rd method in the 60's, while most > B2B enterprises are still stuck on 2. > > How could the CouchDB project benefit from applying the marketing concept? > The potential is great, the adoption rate not so great. Rather than letting > the project be 100% developer driven, I think it would be very beneficial to > mix in some marketing and introduce a customer perspective. > > A book about marketing that everyone in the tech industry love is from 1991, > "Crossing the chasm" by Geoffrey Moore. > It is a based on ideas that originally came in a book from 1962, "Diffusion > of innovations" by Evertt M. Rogers. > The main idea is that the hard thing is to get innovations into the main > market - satisfy risk-adverse decision makers. > > When it comes to strategy, we can learn one thing from Michael Porter. The > single idea that Porter builds on is that the one with a strategy always wins > over the one without a strategy. You have to have to sacrifice something. > Why is this so? Because the guy that tries to compete with everyone will have > competitors that become better by focusing more narrowly (on cost, value or a > customized solution). It is not like you loose to one competitor, you loose > to several at the same time, because each of them had a different strategy > and they became better than you and shared the market between themselves. > They all positioned themselved to be a winner in a given market segment and > the one that did not quite know what segment to go for lost in all segments, > eventually. > > My suggestion is to start with defining the market and competition: > Define the market for CouchDB 3.0 (by target group and need served) and > identify the 2 competitors in that market segment that have the strongest > brands. > > An illustration: > Lets imagine that we are on the Apple eCar team and want to position a new > highend sportscar that establishes the brand before launching the cheaper > models. We identified Porsche and Tesla as the strongest brands in our > segment. By identifying the two strongest brands in our market segment we can > move on to the challenge of differentiating ourselves towards these 2 brands > and secure a market share. It is a triangualtion technique that uses strong > brands already positioned in the heads of our target group to position > ourselves (again, in the heads of the right people, not e.g. on a feature > comparison table). > > johs -- Professional Support for Apache CouchDB: https://neighbourhood.ie/couchdb-support/
