Turning your product or service into a successful software platform takes a lot more than coding up an API and some documentation. It takes a combination of strategic insight, smart goals, developer savvy, creative marketing, and hard work. Making the right decisions for your platform and your customers is a real challenge. Let RSands Consulting give you insight in choosing the right combination of:
- Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems, Inc.
- business model,
- products and services,
- developer and ISV programs,
- community,
- branding and messaging,
- marketing initiatives,
to maximize adoption and drive growth and profitability. Then leverage RSands Consulting’s expertise to quickly and effectively implement your plan.
Give To Get: Creating Adoption-based Business Models
How do you turn platform adoption into revenue? First step: develop and implement a business model that delivers value to those who use your platform, or to those who want access to them. There are many approaches, and what works best for you depends on your company’s products, the competitive landscape, and the kind of access you can deliver to customers. RSands Consulting can advise you on how to “connect the dots” – build clear links between use of your platform, and demand for your products and services. What if you could:
- Compare alternative strategies and market opportunities, and choose the best model for you.
- Evaluate your competition, and build long-term competitive advantages for your company and its products and services.
- Enhance demand creation and revenue generation by making them a direct consequence of platform use and developer enthusiasm.
- Leverage adoption to create new, unforeseen opportunities and capitalize on them.
- Establish aggressive, realistic, achievable goals for platform adoption, and measure what matters to business success.
- Understand platform adoption in the developing world and build connections with governments and universities that drive momentum.
These are just a few examples of projects that can help make your business model the blueprint for your success. Ask RSands Consulting to help you draw up plans to turn adoption into revenue.
Products, Services, Licensing: Implementing The Model, Building Value
What will you give away? What will you sell? How will you license your platform? What can you offer ISVs and developers that will get them to subscribe to a service or buy professional services? These questions go to the heart of an adoption-led business strategy, and delineate where you make money, and where you create opportunities for your development partners. RSands Consulting knows how to:
- Advise you on establishing differentiated “free” and “paid” offerings and on providing clear incentives to upgrade.
- Help you build compelling multi-level subscription service offerings for both developers and deployers of your platform.
- Build and enhance lucrative professional and engineering services practices to drive deeper customer engagement.
- Evaluate if open source development makes sense for you, choose the right open source strategy and licensing model, and implement it effectively.
- Enable sales and business development to use platform value as a powerful tool.
Creating a cohesive product and service offering that lets developers “try before they buy”, while retaining the capacity to drive direct revenue is a difficult balancing act. Let RSands Consulting guide you to a more potent strategy that sets your platform apart, motivates rapid adoption, and accelerates business.
Success Is a 2-Way Street: Programs That Make Developers and ISVs Successful
Do your developer and ISV programs reduce development costs? Speed time-to-market? Solve tough problems in unique ways? Improve access to new markets and channels?
Designing and implementing your program, maintaining momentum, building partnerships, and measuring results all require insight and experience to avoid pitfalls and maximize ROI. RSands Consulting understands what makes developers tick, and the services and capabilities that an ISV looks for in choosing platforms. Leverage this expertise to build and promote developer and ISV programs that make it easy and profitable for them to play. RSands Consulting can help:
- Research your developer audience to understand their problems and challenges and craft a program to help them win.
- Develop a training and certification program to instill confidence in your platform’s value and set it apart from the competition.
- Create a process to continuously roll out compelling content, code samples, tutorials, and documentation to keep developers and ISVs coming back for more.
- Design and implement a University relations program to incorporate your platform into both coursework and research, bringing new ideas to you and creating a legion of developer advocates in recent graduates.
- Build a catalog of visible, exciting ISV products that showcase your platform and technology and help your partners win new business.
- Eric Lemaréchal, CEO, Mobile Distillery
Those are just a few examples. Let RSands Consulting show you how to foster loyalty and establish an ecosystem in which your programs help drive developer and ISV successes, in turn powering your own business.
Developers are Joiners: Creating Communities That Accelerate Adoption
“Community” is a misunderstood concept in platform marketing. But the idea is simple: developers have come to expect and demand involvement with the platforms they adopt. They want to be able to influence platform evolution, have a direct line into the engineers building it, collaborate with others to jointly create common solutions. Developers want to participate in a conversation with you, that over time becomes a professional relationship based on mutual benefit.
But creating dynamic developer communities is tough. Often, entrenched habit and corporate culture make it hard to give up the control necessary to genuinely involve outside developers in decisions, and demonstrate to them that they’re being heard. And understanding the different ways that different developer constituencies want to participate is no easy task. RSands Consulting can:
- Work with you to devise goals and meaningful metrics to measure your community, and establish the ground rules for decision making.
- Inform your decisions on self-hosting versus public hosting service, contribution policy, community projects, terms of use, and other critical community characteristics.
- Advise you on the technical features and capabilities that developers demand in a community environment. Assist you in choosing the right infrastructure such as source code repositories, ticketing systems, forums, code browsers, mailing lists, contribution submission, and other elements of a multi-faceted community.
- Help you build a community governance model that values participants’ engagement and rewards their efforts, while retaining control over quality and overall platform direction.
- Consult with you on community management methods, help you deal with inevitable issues, and show you how to build a bi-directional, mutually beneficial relationship with your most passionate developer advocates.
- Assist your efforts to understand your developers and leverage that understanding to promote broader adoption.
Getting developers excited about your platform means engaging with them, offering them options to participate, and giving them confidence that they’re truly your partners. Community is the method for building this trust. RSands Consulting can help.
Influencing A Tough Audience: Branding and Messaging for Platforms
Creating an identity for your platform and community is a complex branding challenge. What kind of connection is appropriate between your corporate and product brands and your platform? Do your developers and ISVs want to highlight their adoption of your platform? How do you describe the role of your platform in your corporate strategy? What value does your platform offer the market, and how does it differ from competitive offerings? Consistent branding and messaging for your platform are critical to building a groundswell of developer enthusiasm. But these are some of the most complex, contentious, and costly elements of platform adoption strategy. RSands Consulting can help you navigate these challenges and energize your marketing, showing you how to:
- Make developers feel part of a vibrant community.
- Differentiate between your core products and services, and affiliated ISV and developer adoption of your platform.
- Promote your core brands and establish a strong linkage between your platform and your company.
- Mold perceptions and motivate diverse audiences to think, feel, and do what you need them to, through compelling messaging.
- Align PR, analyst, and executive communications to reinforce your platform messages and excite developers and ISVs.
- Measure the impact of your brand and messaging initiatives in driving platform adoption.
An inconsistent brand strategy and dissonant messaging can dilute your platform adoption efforts. RSands Consulting offers advice and expertise in building your platform’s brand and message to reinforce your investments.
Developer Outreach: Marketing To A Crowd That Hates Marketing
Developers are turned off by traditional marketing – advertising, hype, marketing-laden white papers. They don’t want “messages”. They want code, influence, participation, collaboration, and news they can use right away in getting things done. So give it to them! But how do you reach them when they are actively NOT listening? Learn how to go where the developers are and establish a reputation for quality content, engagement, innovation and rapid response. Leverage social media, connect with tastemakers and key influencers, build buzz at high-visibility events, and create and ride the groundswell. RSands Consulting knows how to get your platform noticed and adopted by developers and ISVs, and can guide you to:
- Find and reach out to the leaders and most influential members of your developer community and gain their trust and endorsement.
- Participate in the right events, in ways that reinforce your message and build awareness of your platform.
- Use blogs, forums, and social media to cost-effectively amplify your message and get it in front of your developer audience.
- Plan launch events that get developers motivated to try your platform, and the news media and analyst world to cover your news and highlight your message.
- Build ongoing processes for generating new content and getting it seen, keeping your platform relevant to developers and ISVs.
When developers see your content as relevant, they’ll listen. RSands Consulting knows how to make content relevant, and convey your “message” through the value your audiences receive.