Tell people your open-source is better than their closed source
March 9, 2024
Nevo David
Well, we all love it when people talk about us. We can enter the conversation to praise ourselves, explain our benefits, and convert some customers.
But the truth is that only more prominent brands enjoy that (mostly).
In Taipy, we have been wildly trying to put our name everywhere, but most of the Reactions we get are: “That’s interesting” or “What’s the difference between you and your competitors?” Taipy is not an established brand—but we will get there.
People don't talk about “company evolution” enough. No, nobody will know who you are in the first year.
Do the things that don’t scale
Try to find every possible conversation in your niche with your competitors and get into the conversation. You can totally self-promote yourself or send people to an article about the benefits of your tool compared to theirs. Don’t be afraid to admit that they are your competitors.
I really love Nick's posts from Trieve. They try to position themselves against big companies such as Algolia with many comparison posts
The Y-Combinator team is missing out on applicants because Algolia can't tell you they're hiring when you query for it.
We are making it way easier for companies to take advantage of the technological leap in information retrieval on display here.
— skeptrune (@skeptrune)
Mar 9, 2024
But the only problem with those posts is that they are being made on the personal feed, and if you don’t have a lot of followers there, you will not get visibility.
If you want to get the eyes of other developers, you need to check where they are. You don’t always have to pay an influencer to promote your posts and pay money. You can literally comment on other influencers’ posts.
Here is a funny example: my friend Atai commented on Yohei and got more views than the original post.
ceiling is being raised. cursor's copilot helped us write "superhuman code" for a critical feature. We can read this code, but VERY few engineers out there could write it from scratch.
Took lots of convincing too. "come on, this must be possible, try harder". and obviously- done… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
— Atai Barkai (Q/acc) (@ataiiam)
Mar 5, 2024
Be the first to comment
Almost every platform today, such as Linkedin and Twitter, lets you know when somebody posts something. They call it the “bell icon” to be the first to comment - hell, even make a bunch of comments pre-made so you can be the first to comment.
Just think about posts your target audience reads; it doesn’t have to be a competitor.
Meet Crowdlens
You need to find it to know when people are talking about you. There are many tools out there to do it. I have been collaborating with Crowdlens, aka CrowdDev, on their new tool that lets you track keywords in more than ten channels (primarily for developers) to know when people are talking about your keywords:
They will research keywords for you based on your website content and volume.
Give you real-time alerts over email or other integrations like Slack.
API-access (not sure why you would need it yet 😋)
Their plans range between $20 to $249, but you can use the coupon NEVOFRIENDS for an entire month free to test the product and see if it works for you. You can cancel it at any time.
Let’s collaborate
I am not getting paid by CrowdDev, at least not with money.
Please email me if you have a tool that can fit the entire open-source community. I am happy to feature you, too.
Comment on other people's posts