Great take on the the fallacy that open source is not just a miraculous business model that lowers your CPL (Cost per Lead). If you want to go in this direction it mainly impacts trust, hopefully your lead conversion rate and thus might have a marginal impact on your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). What #metrics do your open source marketing team use?
This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke to Reshma Khilnani, CEO and founder of Medplum. Medplum is an electronic health record development platform — specific, right? And of course it's an open source company. Here are some of the lessons from the conversation with Reshma: -- Open source is not always about growth. In Medplum's case, the reason to have an open source project is to build trust — their customers are used to black box software platforms that they invest lots of time in to do a POC and then end up not working. So the fact that there's an open source project that they can try and play around with builds a lot of trust even before a POC starts. -- On the other hand, the types of customers Medplum works with just aren't interested in messing around with an open source project that doesn't come with compliance certificates and support baked in. So Reshma doesn't lose sleep about companies deciding to self-support using the OSS instead of becoming a customer. -- Let's be honest, there's not a bunch of developers out there building electronic health record systems for fun. A good reminder that there's no "one size fits all" strategy when it comes to open source companies. -- This is Reshma's 3rd startup, and we had an interesting conversation about how running an open source startup is different from her previous two companies. -- Did you think Medplum's focus is too specific? Reshma doesn't, and she even sometimes thinks that it's too broad! Check out the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/emUFg88C
Great take on the fallacy that open source is not just a miraculous business model that lowers your CPL (Cost per Lead). I completely agree that the true impact of open source goes beyond just cost metrics. It significantly influences trust and can improve your lead conversion rate, which may subsequently have a positive impact on your CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). In my experience, our open source marketing team focuses on a variety of metrics to gauge success and guide strategy. Some of the key metrics we track include: Community Growth: Monitoring the increase in community members, contributions, and engagement. Adoption Rate: Tracking the number of downloads, installations, or active users of our open source projects. Contribution Rate: Measuring the number and quality of contributions from the community. Customer Feedback: Collecting and analyzing feedback from users to understand their needs and satisfaction levels. Brand Perception: Assessing how our involvement in open source impacts our brand's reputation and trustworthiness. Lead Source Attribution: Identifying leads that come through open source channels and their subsequent conversion rates. What specific metrics does your team find most insightful?
Partnerships Expert | Lifelong Learner | Entrepreneur | Longhorn
1moMy cybersecurity professor said something that stuck with me and really applies here - If knowing how a lock works is enough to break the lock, it’s not really a good lock. A good lock requires having something that nobody else has - be it a key, a biometric, or a password. This applies to security for sure. Open source actually means more secure because it means the security is vetted and spotted by many people. Then, it’s up to you to keep the passwords and keys to your specific system secure. But it also applies to business. Just because someone knows how you built your business doesn’t mean they have the key to activate the same business themselves. Businesses are a mix of lots of moving parts (pins in a lock) that all have to be activated in order to function. Keeping your pins secret means that once someone discovers the pins, your business will face tough competition right out of the gate. The Innovation Stack describes this phenomenon really well.