Marketing an Open Source Product with Jonathan Symonds

FiredUp! - The Startup Marketing Podcast

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.

Thank you for listening! Tune in to all the episodes for practical tips on crushing your startup marketing goals. Don’t forget to follow, rate, and review the podcast, and tell us your key takeaways!

CONNECT WITH JONATHAN SYMONDS:

Website

X (Twitter): @minio

LinkedIn

CONNECT WITH FIREBRAND:

Firebrand is a startup marketing agency. We help tech startups secure outsized marketing outcomes on their path to growth.

Facebook

LinkedIn

X (Formerly Twitter)

Work with Firebrand

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Blue Ocean Strategy

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1. Marketing in the Open-Source Space with Jonathan Symonds (00:00:00)

2. Position the value of products differently in open source (00:03:38)

3. Balancing open source philosophy with commercial demands. (00:09:39)

4. Using multiple tools to gather data and analyze user behavior (00:16:03)

5. The importance of authenticity in paid promotions (00:20:46)

6. Content creation strategies for a tech companies (00:24:10)

7. How to measure performance across different channels in an open source company. (00:30:40)

8. The value in partnerships for a startup in the open-source space (00:33:44)

9. Leveraging events in open source marketing (00:39:40)

10. Smart People, Dumb Questions Segment (00:44:35)

11. Fired Up Five Segment (00:48:28)