# Marketing team manifesto We are the Nix marketing team, and our mission to help grow the Nix user base. ## Why we want growth Growth is instrumental to something. What is that? We strive to advance the state of the art in software engineering. That's why we're using and contributing to Nix. Ultimately, we're interested in using and making software that is - more up-to-date - more reliable - easier to distribute - easier to integrate - easier to collaborate on. We cannot achieve this alone. As the Nix marketing team, we believe that talking about work done is as important as doing the work. This is where we can help the Nix ecosystem to thrive. We're convinced that the more people *know about* Nix, the more people will *use* Nix, and the more people will become *contributors and maintainers*. We want to serve those people who are indispensible for maintaining and developing the Nix ecosystem, by promoting their work and facilitating communication with a wider audience. ## How we want to grow Our strategy is for the Nix ecosystem to become known for something unique we already excel at. This is what we will emphasize in order to attract users. This is not to set directions for development, but simply recognising and leveraging current strengths. ### Target audience Our target audience are software developers. Nix tooling already fits developer use cases most closely, and it is developers who will derive the most value from using Nix in its current state. Developers are also more likely to become contributors, and eventually maintainers. Finally, among our users, software professionals have the greatest influence on organisations that can provide the resources necessary to keep developing and maintaining the Nix ecosystem. ### Communication strategy Nix can do many things. If we start to talk about all of those things at once, the message gets lost. For example: There is only limited amount of space on the landing page. We will choose a narrow set of topics that best serve our purpose of increasing adoption most effectively. The particular focus may change over time as we move through the adoption life cycle for our target audience. ## How to measure growth In order to know where we're going we need to know where we are. Therefore, we will first collect metrics relevant to our mission, separated into phases in the user journey: ### Discovery phase - Google Search trends - Social media impressions - Visits to the landing page ### User phase - Number of members and messages on the community platforms (Discourse, Matrix, GitHub) - Binary cache usage - Number of queries on search.nixos.org - Website statistics on documentation - Community surveys ### Contribution phase - Number of contributors and forks - Number of opened issues and pull requests ## 3-months plan (June through August 2023) The current team consists of 5 people, each having ca. 2 hours per week available for working on marketing topics. We estimate the required work to fulfill the following goals to ca. 115 hours over three months, given a total team capacity of ca. 120 hours in the same period. ### Media outreach - More posts on social media - Currently involved: @idabzo @pxc @btjh @garbas @raboof - Estimated effort: 2h/week (24h total) - Revive the newsletter - One post per month - Currently involved: @idabzo @garbas - Estimated effort: 2h/month (5h total) - Continue "What's new in Nix?" - Goal: Release one video - Currently involved: @btjh @garbas @djacu @tomberek - Estimated effort: 20h - (optional) Write a content policy - What to include, what not to - Which langauge to use - Define audience personae - Estimated effort: 10h ### Community Survey 2023 - Goal: publish in June - Currently involved: @garbas @kranzes @Arsleust - Estimated effort: 55h ## 1-year plan - Set up continuous collection and presentation of metrics - Develop an communication strategy and adoption plan for the Nix platform - Establish a communication workflow to support community teams with outreach - Support appearances in podcasts, interviews, conferences, ... - Publish 12 newsletters - Publish 4 video updates ## Get in touch We are looking for additional members. Please contact the team members if you would like to participate. We are especially interested in people interested in frontend development, content creation for social media, and technical writing. --- # Developing thoughts In the last few weeks, @garbas, @arsleust, and @fricklerhandwerk met multiple times to write down a strategy and roadmap for the Nix marketing team, based on prior discussion with people involved in the past months (@btjh @djacu @idabzo @jeremiahs @kranzes @pxc @ronef @tomberek and others). This is an account of the thought process that resulted in a [mission and roadmap for the Nix marketing team](https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/pull/1069). ## Why Growth Growth is instrumental to something. What is that? Why do you want growth (personal reasons)? - @arsleust: - more up-to-date packages in Nixpkgs - more contributors - better quality of software - more users of Nix -> more users of your software if it leverages Nix - @garbas: - more companies using Nix - companies can supply the resources to make all of the above happen - create a sustainable ecosystem - if I had to do programming, rather that way - don't feel smart enough to use other tools - more effective development leads to better quality, things will just work - scalable growth is better than convincing people individually - more Nix users are more people to collaborate on software in a sane way - @fricklerhandwerk: - I don't want to care anymore about computer problems that should have never existed Apparently we have different kinds of Nix users we are talking about: - user - we want them to be able (our) software without friction - it should be easy to try or use software without even thinking about it - developers - the people we want to collaborate with on our creative work - we want to share our work with them - contributors - people who will solve problems we will never manage to solve - people who make small improvements, such as "bumping versions" - those who are invested in the project and will do amazing things - maintainers who will do work literally no one else will do - they will help making the ecosystem work at all, and let everyone else get on with life - maintainers - people who can help contributors getting their work merged and curate the direction of the project We care about all of them, because there is a progression from user to contributor. But also, we cannot have users without contributors, because the system has to work to begin with. Right now we care mostly about users and to a lesser degree about developers, because we assume that funneling people into becoming Nix users enables will necessarily capture developers' attention, and eventually those may become contributors. This provides a natural boundary to the responsibilites of the documentation team that mostly focuses on developers and contributors. Marketing cares also about "pre-users", because the question is how people become users to begin with: - people who know about Nix and have never tried it - we've all been ther: what is that, why should I care? Now we roughly know why we are here. We want the ecosystem to work, and we know we need more users, developers, and contributors. Objective: What can we do, what *should* we do to achieve that general goal? We have to start with where we are. @garbas provides the following estimates: - 5k contributors to Nixpkgs (15k GitHub stars) - assumption: 1:5 ratio of contributors to users - guess that 4x that many people are using packages from Nixpkgs - conclusion: 20k user-developers of Nixpkgs - assumption: 1:5 ratio of early adopters - conclusion: 100k people know about Nix(pkgs) - we also care about Nix contributors - much lower number, in the hundreds Objective: Measure actual user base, and figure out the fraction of developers (and ideally the number of potential contributors), and what they need: - need to know what is the right thing to work on - measure our effectiveness - track where in the [technology adoption life cycle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_life_cycle) we are - @garbas' intuition: currently crossing the "chasm" - @garbas: conclusion: widen the funnel to grow more contributors and maintainers - @fricklerhandwerk: objection: may grow existing users just as well - @garbas: that's a job for the documentation team - @fricklerhandwerk: agreed - if we succeed, the ratio will actually grow because we get into more late adopters who we can expect to be less likely to become highly involved - we probably want to onboard them as contributors/maintainers as well, but that may need a different approach - @fricklerhandwerk: have to keep an eye on the maintainers:contributors ratio and workflows not to overwhelm maintenance We currently have certain things in terms of metrics, but they are dispersed: - we probably want to have it all in one place, it would be very important - e.g. funnel the numbers into Grafana - needs continuous monitoring - to some extent blocked on the infra team - @zimbatim is working on [making things smoother](https://github.com/NixOS/foundation/issues/79) Anything more important than metrics? - figure out the messaging and adapt the website? - based on target audience, can't serve everyone - @fricklerhandwerk: isn't this blocked on the rewrite? - @garbas: no, messaging gets more bang for the buck - outreach on social media, newsletter - "maintenance" tasks, current main activity - probably first priority How will we know how to make decisions in a changing situation (high growth) if we don't have metrics? - @garbas: we will know from social media Discussing the next community survey: - there is a bias: most "engaged" people are "loudest" - main outcome from the surveys are trends - those will only be useful in 5 years, but we need to do it now - still, last year's survey was useful per se - we need to listen to users, but also go in the direction "we" want users to be The pitch: "NixOS is the best Linux developer OS out there" Mapping out objectives for the next three months: - a year is too much - what capacity the team will have in the next quarter? what can actually be done? - media outreach - posts for social media - 2h/week - monthly rotation on a team - currently involved: - @idabzo @pxc @btjh @garbas @raboof - revive the newsletter - monthly - 2h/month - all the content is more or less prepared - aggregation of what was posted on social medias - continue "what's new with nix?" - one video per ~3 months - goal: release one video - effort estimate: - script: 2h for the team (~3 people) - recordings: - intro/outro: 2h (~3 people) - presentations (~10 topics, 1min/topic): 2h (2 people) - post-processing: 2h - total ~18-20h; ~9-10 h for two people - ~1h/w for two people - currently involved: - @btjh @garbas @djacu @tomberek - (optional) write a content policy - what to include, what not to - which langauge to use - define audience personae - estimate: 2h for full team (5 people, two meetings) - total: 10h - total estimate: 30h (outreach) + 20h (videos, mostly done) + 10h (content policy) = 60h - get the survey out - goal: publish in June - blockers: - get back the limesurvey EC2 instance - fallback: google forms - effort estimate: - 2d create questionnaire - 8h review and discussion - 1h write and publish announcement - (1-2h outreach, may be merged into outreach activities) - 2x8h statistics evaluation - 2-3d qualitative analysis - total: ~55h (3-5 people) - currently involved: - @garbas @kranzes @Arsleust - stretch goal: prepare discussion on messaging - idea: write down decisions to guide future contributions - current team capacity: 5 people, ~2h/w total (120h) - @garbas has ~4h/w for marketing activities - 1h/w marketing meetings - total effort estimate ~115h After this initial discussion, @garbas and @fricklerhandwerk followed up with finding concise wording that capture these thoughts in order to put on the team page on nixos.org: https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-homepage/pull/1069. ---- ## Why does the Marketing team exist? Before, we often assumed *growth* as the main reason - want to continue using nix -> needs to grow, spread, improve - the only tool to offer certain features **Purpose of a marketing team** is to present Nix/NixOS to new people and organizations. Not only to present, but also excite enough to give Nix/NixOS a proper try. Many of us perceive marketing as a bad thing and we have every reason to feel that way. We've all been decieved by some marketing sweet talk at some point in the past. So, **is marketing a bad thing?** Any tool in the hands of a malicius person can be used to do harm. Marketing is no different. We want to **give Nix/NixOS a fair chance** to be perceived as the technology of the future. We want to do this **without compromising our ethics** and without following any dishonest practise. # What marketing isn't? Marketing isn't just advertising, public relations or putting together a website. It's also about everything leading up to those activities to support the rest of the community. This is probably best described with an example, which is also a question that was asked frequently. *Isn't Marketing team's job the same as Documentation team's job?* That is a fair question. And there is some overlap between the two. Where do we draw the line? For one teaching somebody is not the same as convincing them to try new things. A language might be different. Their attention span is different. And all this needs to be taken into account. A concrete example would be: - Documentation team writes a Nix language tutorial - Marketing team makes a shorter version (like a summary) that can be consumed much faster while skipping some sections. Of course at the end we link to the proper tutorial. Now not every tutorial will have a shorter version, but some might. I hope this gives a little understanding where Marketing ends and other teams take over. # Responsibilities As any team we have our share of responsabilities. Here is a quick **list of tools and services** that we currently maintain: - https://nixos.org - https://search.nixos.org - https://twitter.com/nixos_org - https://www.linkedin.com/company/nixos-foundation - https://chaos.social/@nixos_org - https://www.youtube.com/c/NixOS-Foundation Our responsability are: - Adoption plan (Come up with a plan how grow Nix/NixOS) - Promote releases (Nix, NixOS, ...) - Monitoring growth (It is ok to plan for success) > I'm probably missing some responsabilities. > [name=garbas] ## Adoption plan It is easy, especially with less technical topics, to lose focus on what you are doing. That is why **everything we do at marketing team must come from the adoption plan**. All of our strategy is based on the premise that **we want to grow** Nix/NixOS community. You know, world domination. Sometimes good tech is overlooked, sometimes bad tech is hyped too much. Sometimes success and adoption comes by simple luck, but **it is ok to plan for success**. We're not the first to want our technology to succeed. This was done many times and we should learn from the work of others. Ofcourse every case is different, so *"translating"* it to our situation is also important. Adoption plan should always be questioned and it is expected to evolve as Nix/NixOS gets more adoption. For this reason we have a separate document to describe it and go into details for our decisions.  ## Promote releases (and other events in community) While our main focus will ofcourse be releases Whenever a release happens we should try promote it. ### What's new in Nix? Currently we are recording a series, **What's new in Nix?**. Which covers most important changes in Nix for the last 2-3 releases. We aim the video to be around 10min long. ### Newsletter weekly.nixos.org has been abandoned for some time, but plans are to revive it. ## Monitoring growth We need to know if our work makes a difference. But we need to **do it in a privacy respecting manner**. No personal data will be ever collected, but just an aggregate. E.g. number of visitors on website, number of downloads in cache.nixos.org All the work is and will be done in public and everything will be announced on Discourse. Idea is to collect all interesting metrics about: - visitors or pre-users (Are we promoting in the right places?) - users (Are users finding what they are looking for?) - contributors (Is contributing hard?) > We should probably have a separate document about that details. > [name=garbas] This work is in the early stages and you can follow it in [nixos-metrics](https://github.com/nixos/nixos-metrics) repository. ===== Description: Meet bi-weekly to coordinate marketing related activities….. **needs more** The marketing team has engaged in several efforts to increase Nix’s visibility; - Community Survey - Regular release videos for Nix <links> - Increased social media presence <insert graph> - CSS work - In progress: Increased coordination with technical releases Future plans: - provide a more consistent styling across the hosted webpages - Analysis of the community survey result - “For developers” - Potential: release video for NixOS - Potential: lay groundwork for Nix 3.0 - In progress: “By the numbers” - metrics and grafana - Proposal: Participation in other podcasts, talks, or conferences. Discussion: We are in need of additional members, please contact the team via <insert link>. We are especially interested in people interested in frontend development, content creation for social media, and technical writing.