Growth Hacking & Community WITS Raleigh 2016

October 1, 2016

Ginny C Ghezzo IBM Watson IoT

Program Director

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Growth Hacking and Open CommunitiesWhat is Growth Hacking?

What is Open Source?

What does Growth Hacking have to do with Open Source?

Be Relevant

Pick Your Tactics

Measure & Refine

Keys to doing Community Well

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What is Growth Hacking?

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What is Growth Hacking?

1. Product Market Fit 2. Pick the Goal & Tactics3. Measure, Refine & Optimize

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“A Growth Hacker is a person whose true north is growth. ” - Sean Ellis, 2010

Airbnb hacked Craigslist as a way to automate advertisement. $24B Valuation

Spotify integrated with Facebook logon & news feed to raise awareness in network. $8B Valuation

Dropbox provided incentive of free storage for users to refer others and made referrals easy.$10B Valuation

Upworthy leverages A\B Testing to reduce bounce & make recommendation. Increase sharing by 28%

Slack found a product market fit by creating a market that did not exist: Organizational Transformation.$2B Valuation

Examples of Growth Hacks from Startups

http://growthhackers.com/growth-studies

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What is Open Source?

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“Open source is free like a puppy is free.” - Scott McNealy, Sun CEO, 2005

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“Happiness is a warm puppy.” - Charles M. Schulz, 1962

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Shauna & Saffron are available for adoption through Furry Friends Pet Rescue.

@furryfriendspetrescue

What is Open Source Software?

● Software freely available in the source code format● Users have the ability to modify the software● Often developed in a collaborative community effort● Open source software does not equal public domain ● License grants permission but may also impose obligations

Tip: Add licenses to all your code.Be generous!

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Open-source software (OSS) is computer software with its source code made available with a license in which the copyright holder provides the rights to study, change, and distribute the software to anyone and for any purpose. - Wikipedia

What does Growth Hacking have to do with Open Source?

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Similarities between Startups & Communities

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Product Market Fit Open source, open standards and other communities grow from a specific technical need, ability to access code and their vitality.

Cross Promotion Foundations and communities are able to do natural cross promotions. Use of APIs also encourages synergies.

No to Little Funding Startups face what Open Source projects have dealt with for years. Keep the budgets low while tweaking for success.

Funnel Growth Hackers focus on Acquisition, Activation, Retention, & Revenue. Communities progress from Awareness, Consuming, Contributing and Mentoring Others.

Retention Over Acquisition It is cheaper to keep a participant or customer then find a new one. It is also a lot more fun to keep a community member then lose one!

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Product Fit“You have a good restaurant because you serve good food, not because

you tell people you do” - Nick Berry

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DjangoGirls is fun to use & reuse. Easy to use and various contribution opportunity through translation and tools.

“Peace Corps for Geeks” leverages open APIs and open data to organize projects & deliver solutions.

Eclipse leverage analytics and A\B testing to monitor the health & growth. Including commits, closed tickets, traffic, etc.

Women of OpenStack acquire new contributors through tactics including internships, meetups, and ‘an amazing culture’

Apache Software Foundation leverages affiliation tactics such as committer blog aggregation & ‘powered by’ logo.

Cloud Foundry leverages SEO and automation to optimize lead generation with a focus approachability for end users.

Examples of Growth Hacks from Community

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Join me

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Next Meeting November 2 at 6pm at Maxpoint

http://www.meetup.com/PyData-Triangle/@pydatatriangle

Next Meeting November 16 at 6pm at TBD

http://www.meetup.com/pyladies-rdu/@pyladiesrdu

See them all at http://www.techgirlz.org/

@tritechgirlz

PyData Triangle PyLadies RDU

“Growth Hacking is not selling ice to eskimos. Growth Hacking is selling ice to polar bears & bartenders.”

- Ginny Ghezzo

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Pick Your Tactics“Content is fire, Social Media is gasoline. ” - Jay Baer

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Example: Opensource.com Bets on Writers

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Opensource.com believes that good writers, provide great content which grows their community.

Opensource.com invests in their Writers Great topics, themes and series Style guides Free, Professional editing services

Opensource.com invests in keeping their Writers Community Moderators to maintain connectionsMailing lists & social media connection Make writers successful and proud

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https://opensource.com/how-submit-article

“Our ability to execute has been amazing. We experiment & we give the people what they want. The only way to do this is to track the numbers.”

-Jen Wike Huger@JenWike

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Measure & Refine“The price of light is less than the cost of darkness. ” - Nick Berry

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Example: IBM Steps Up again with Hyperledger What did IBM do with Hyperledger

The Linux Foundation announced The Hyperledger Project to develop enterprise grade, open source distributed ledger framework. IBM donated 44,000 lines of code to the Hyperledger Project.

What it learned from past donations Partner with innovative companies in various disciplines. IBM Garages provide design & implementation collaboration for business. Easy of Setup for experimenting and contributing.

Get Started here today http://www.ibm.com/blockchain/

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“Why open source for IBM? Quite simply because speed of innovation can only happen, for ALL ecosystem members, if we all work together with a common purpose”

- Johanna Koester@jokoester

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Do This!

https://developer.ibm.com/open/contribute/https://opensource.com/how-submit-article

Keys to doing Community Well

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How Open Communities Do it Well 1. Be Useful - Stay simple

“If advertisers spent the same amount of money on improving their products as they do on advertising then they wouldn't have to advertise them.” - Will Rogers (1879-1935)

2. Be Helpful - Get to the point, Be available “If you really care about starting a movement, have the courage to follow and show others how to follow.” - Derek Sivers

3. Be Nice - Beware of insider talk, foster new users “Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don't show up.” - Seth Godin

4. Be Flexible - Stay Relevant“There is no innovation and creativity without failure. Period.” - Dr Brene Brown

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More free Advice 1. Community needs both value and direction. Corporations pay

membership fees for value, developers contributing because they believe in the direction.

2. People participate because the love: the love the the code and the friendships being developed.

3. Leverage Analytics. 4. Quality of commits, quality of releases are the value.5. For Open Source, the funnel moves people from consumers to

contributors.6. Make it easy for companies to vet both consumption of and

participation in Open Source.7. Having a code of conduct matters for inclusion and retention.

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Links Worth Knowing OpenSource.com - http://opensource.com/ Open-Services.net - http://open-services.net/ developerWorks Open - https://developer.ibm.com/open/

GrowthHackers.com - http://growthhackers.com Definitive Guide to GrowthHacking - https://www.quicksprout.com/the-definitive-guide-to-growth-hacking/ Treat Open Source like a Startup - https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/open-source-marketing-with-velocityjs/ Startup Generator - http://tiffzhang.com/startup/ A Beginners Guide to Growth Hacking -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnpLCiuMgcU

The power of vulnerability - https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability?language=en The Tribes we Lead - https://www.ted.com/talks/seth_godin_on_the_tribes_we_lead#t-71877 How to start a movement -

https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_how_to_start_a_movement?language=en 29

Questions and Discussion

Personal Thank You to Kai Maetzel, Johanna Koester, James Bogner,

Adam Martin, Deirdre Clarke, Pat Huff, Dragos Cojocari

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Useful Quotes 1. "Do something that is so good, that is so valuable that users can't help to talk about it."2. "Make space for others to be part of it" 3. "Make events regular, predictable, consistent" 4. "Open is the expectation now. Community and Momentum Differentiate" 5. "Bucket with holes needs fixing, not more water"6. "As with any library, it is used because it is useful, not because it is trendy or hip" 7. "Two goals to open: Write Less Code & Get others to access what you are doing" 8. "What is the proof that it is good, stable, has longevity, performs, etc?”9. "Is it still relevant"

10. "StackExchange is my community"11. "Stay relevant to the developer community" 12. "Know the motivation of your participants" 13. 'Mastery, Autonomy, Purpose: Are they getting these? Are they seeing the good?" 14. "There is momentum" 15. "Start small, build credibility, spread naturally" - Nick Berry 16. “It is the taste of the fish, not the fisherman” - Nick Berry 17. “The price of light is less than the cost of darkness.”18. "When you have credibility, people will help, people will talk & spread the word"19. “They became purposeful and they made it their own”

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