Gitroom

No matter what you do, you need a call to action for the visitor.

That can be an external CTA such as “Give us a star on GitHub,” as I usually put it on most platforms.

It can also be on the main website under “Get started,” “Book a call,” “Join the wait list,” etc.

So what should you put?

We are not equal

Not all open-source repositories are equal. Some have a cloud version, some will forever be a stateless library, and some want to have a cloud version but don’t yet have one.

Here is an interesting scenario: You are a stateless library with no cloud solution. You get stars (you rock at this), but who are these stars? Is there a way to contact them? Did they permit us to contact them?

The answer is no - you can still do some cold outreach to them, but overall, it can backfire if you don’t know how to do it.

You need to find a way to generate leads

Generating leads

You will get tons of information about your users if you have a cloud solution, especially with a free tier. It’s usually pretty good.

But if not, or you want to generate a massive amount of leads faster, you can do a few things.

Waitlists are perfect. Even if you are unsure what the cloud solution will be, you can always create a bit of FOMO and generate leads. This is a great opportunity because you can ask more questions, such as:
1. Company name
2. What is your use-case
3. You can ask for a budget if you want to add more filtering.
Pro tip: Add urgency and scarcity - tell people something like “We are selecting 100 people (scarcity) to be the first to use our cloud solution. Registration closes on X date (urgency).
We have done that with CopilotKit, generating more than 130 leads in one week.
Get even further with “Apply to join the waitlist.” You can check out this exciting video cut I posted on X.
Book a call - this one has a massive filter, so if you are small, “Apply to join the waitlist” might actually work better.
Pro tip: register all the people who booked a call with you in the newsletter.
Discord is a great way to talk to your audience, but I am not a big fan of Discord in terms of engagement because once people are on other Discord servers, they usually don’t see your notifications (and you don’t want to spam them with @everyone).
Intercom is a great way to talk to people on your main website. you can also register them to your newsletter.

The best lead generator

I think the best lead generator is a smaller product that relates to your audience and incentivizes them to add their email address.

For example, one of Gitroom's most famous lead generators is the Gitroom library, and previously, the GitHub trending monitor they are both getting “open-source founders/maintainers,” so that’s a good audience for Gitroom.

I generated the lead. What now?

You can either go with what I do mainly: lead nurturing, where I add you to my newsletter and give you free value until you want to buy something, or you can email the person to schedule a meeting. You can do both.

Sometimes, people are not ready to purchase yet, so you need to “nurture” them and send them valuable content every X time.

Just a tiny note: since you will not get many leads, do some pre-sales and don’t automate the process, investigate the prospect, and create a good email that looks super customized to the prospect's needs.

Alternatively try to contact the prospect over Linkedin or Discord, it can feel even more personalized.

Use a CRM

One thing you always need to remember is that it’s more likely that people who know you will buy from you than the ones who don’t.

Adding prospects into the CRM can classify the leads and follow up with them after X amount of time.

You don’t have to invest heavily in HubSpot or Salesforce. There are simpler options, like SalesLoft.

Resources