The Power of Community

April 18th, 2008 Stacey Schneider

Recently, I have gotten to know Roberto Galoppini. In our conversations, Roberto has asked some pressing questions on two of the more interesting areas of my job. The importance of Community and the importance of Microsoft to Hyperic in growing our business. I’ll talk about his recent post on Microsoft later, but right now, I’d like to elaborate on how big our community is to me at Hyperic.

At Hyperic, I run marketing. I am responsible for getting our project and our software known in the market. This is how we grow adoption and sales, which ultimately powers further development and innovation. In this regard, I actually own three “departments” - classic marketing of course, with all the ads, PR and branding. I also own the community management and development, and all of the public facing web applications and infrastructure management. And yes, I eat our own dog food - I am an internal user of Hyperic HQ to help me manage our web based applications.

I am a technologist at heart, and like to have fun with technology. I was never interested in the classic marketing career - while I admired the marketers I have worked with in the past, I just selfishly never wanted to be that far away from the technology. Turns out, in open source - this works to my advantage.

Community is HUGE. In order for an open source business model to work - you need to have mass adoption. Not mass downloads, adoption. This means people need to find what you build really useful. This means getting into the weeds with them, listen, help, and keep them happy. If they are happy, they are going to talk about it, which is good to get more adoption.

This doesn’t seem like rocket science to me. Spending millions on ads is the “hard way” these days. I wish I remember where I read a marketing statistic that the average web buyer reads 6 to 7 reviews of a product before purchasing. I think the stat was directly referring to buying goods at Amazon or something, but I found it totally believable for open source software as well. I bet 90% of our community downloads came from people who:

1. Found our name in a search on Google at least twice
2. Read at least 3 posts in our forums that dealt with an issue they too were having or could have
3. Checked at least one other independent, trusted resource like Wikipedia or another technology community.

Then they try it, for free. Many are content with the open source version, and enough are motivated by that success to buy Enterprise. Note that not once through that process did I mention a banner ad, or a magazine ad. Maybe the Google reference came from paid search, but twice as often, and with 8 times better conversion rates, it came from a natural search.

So, when earlier this week, I met with another analyst, Bruce Guptill from Saugatuck Technology and he asked - why is Hyperic everywhere these days? How is it you guys are at the forefront of everything it seems? I first deadpanned, “I never sleep,” but then quickly gave him the real reason, “our community never sleeps”. Its worldwide, large and always active. Somebody in IT is ALWAYS awake. This is why when Roberto asked, “Why is Hyperic employing three different community managers?”, my answer was easy.

Almost all of our eventual customers meet Hyperic through our Community.

There’s much more in my response to Roberto, but this sums it up. And its why you see me actually posting on the forums, and while I will continue to do so for a long time.

PS. I would also like to throw out some warm congratulations to our man in charge of Community Management. John Mark Walker became a daddy for the second time last weekend! He now has a healthy new son, Cary Walker. Congrats, my friend! :)

Entry Filed under: HQ