Marketing an Open Source Product with Jonathan Symonds

Open source can be seen as a marketing strategy more than anything else. And when you don’t always know who your end user is and what they’re using the product for, it can prove to be challenging. Luckily, today’s guest knows just how to market in this unique landscape. This week, episode 20 of the FiredUp! podcast is about marketing in the open source space!

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In this episode of the FiredUp! podcast, Jonathan Symonds shares his strategies for appealing to users from all angles and actionable steps you can take right now to build an engaged community around your product that is proud to represent it.

Jonathan Symonds is the Chief Marketing Officer for MinIO where he is responsible for product marketing, demand generation and corporate awareness. Previously, Jonathan was the CMO of Ayasdi, a pioneer in the field of machine intelligence and was the VP of Marketing for GPU-powered analytics pioneer, HeavyAI. He has over 20 years of enterprise software and analytics marketing experience at Ace Metrix, 2Wire and Tandberg. He holds an MBA from Cornell and a BA from Washington and Lee University.

Jonathan, Morgan, and Chris discuss:

- Startups play either a leadership or stewardship role in open source projects, depending on the ownership.
- Balancing conflict from the expectations of idealistic users and the commercial demands of running a business by staying true to the principles of the brand itself.
- Using web analytics to identify who is using your product and in what ways they’re using it.
- Maximizing content creation efforts through technical writing and video production.
- The buckets of marketing KPIs that MinIO is using to track performance.

If able to sustain long-term success, communities are a brand’s lifeline, creating unparalleled loyalty and value that directly impacts growth potential.

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