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HOWTO Go About Marketing to Developers?

Posted by Cliff on from the where-traditional-marketing-strategies-fail dept.

byrnereese asks: "My company has finally realized that one of the keys to our success will be to create a strong developer program (IBM's Developer Works, and Palm's PalmSource come to mind as examples). It just so happens that I have been appointed to lead this program. Now I have a lot of my own ideas, but I wanted to ask a large developer community directly the one question I know I am going to have to articulate a coherent answer to at some point: 'What is the most effective way to market a toolset, or development platform, to a developer in order to encourage them to build products using your product, without turning them off at the same time?'"

4 of 267 comments (clear)

  1. Advertise it on slashdot by anonymousman77 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    1. Advertise it on slashdot 2. Call the thing "IT" 3. Tell us NOTHING about "IT" 4. Plant the idea of "IT" in the media 5. Start widespread media speculation that "IT" is the answer to everything

  2. Don't use the GPL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    First off: getting on the front page of /. is a good start.

    Second, though it may not be popular around here: don't release the toolkit under the GPL. I'm assuming you'll want corporate developers building add-on's and whatnot for you, and Corporate America is terrified of the GPL.

    The BSD license takes out the scary bits, but probably isn't a good choice either: my strong suspicion is that most corporate legal departments aren't savvy enough to note the difference, and would likely recommend steering clear of any such 'viral license' (as defined by Microsoft FUD)

  3. Eclipse, dammit! by DigitalDragon · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    This is the tool I swear by, and would actually pay some money if required.

    IBM released this 40 million dollar project for free, and I believe it got to market just by a word of mouth mostly, and being free. This IDE does the job right, now other Java IDE comes even close. It is fast, great interface, and people behind it really listened to all the IDE complaints and tried fixing most of them.

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    http://dtum.livejournal.com
  4. open source it..... by BLAG-blast · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    An unrestricted license like BSD would be your best bet....

    Second would be producting a GPL'd version and retaining the copyrights so it can be reused in non-open-source sales. Also selling non-GPL'd source code could be a nice side line.

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    M0571y H@rml355.