Learning to fly

Getting popular, step-by-step

5 July, 2010

When developing an open source project you start to see some traction relatively soon after the first release. A few months later there come encouraging comments from enthusiastic users who soon become regular posters in the forum, mailing lists and IRC. The downloads figures and web traffic statistics start to rise, slow but steady. You start receiving contributions, appearing on magazines and blogs, seeing a word-of-mouth effect being constantly spread on twitter, receiving a flow of partnership proposals all around the world, and you start wondering “Did we really do it? Do we have a product that really solves an important problem better than any other product? Are we the best thing since sliced bread? Are we going to become really popular, like Janet Jackson after showing her boobie at the Superblow?”. And then, back to earth, the questions in mind are rather “So, how could we keep in track and reach our full potential?”.

Getting the first enthusiastic supporters and starting a word-of-mouth effect is just the beginning. Unless you try to push it somehow, it will take many years before you become a little bit known mainstream, if you ever get to that point. And when you push forward, there is still a long and exhausting road to take your project to a tipping point, after which the whole word-of-mouth process accelerates and takes traction by itself. And just bear in mind that the effort you will need to invest is very considerable and the results can only be seen in the mid-term, so you need to remain constant.

At eBox, we considered from the start that communication and promotion of our project was crucial if we ever wanted to get to a critical mass of users, and we knew that sporadic appearances in media or blogs was not enough to take us there. So, for the last 18 months we have had a full-time person in communication, which is a lot for a startup with no external funding and with strong needs in resources for R&D, service delivery and sales. There was a lot of work to do first setting up the communication basis before we could start with any visible action, but now things are up and running and we have well-established processes that can help us, for example, to start, spot and participate in discussions about eBox on the Internet.

However, having full-time professionals in communication do not generate popularity overnight. Although we had a healthy growth in all our indicators for the past 12 months (around 5-10% monthly growth in downloads, in new forum members, in incoming links, etc), we are just now really harvesting the fruits of our communication efforts. There are at least three facts that prove that eBox is becoming popular and getting closer to the tipping point:

• Linux Format, the leading Linux magazine in the UK, made a benchmark about Linux firewalls for its June 2010 issue, where it included all the best-known firewall-specific Linux distributions, and eBox. The fact that eBox was included would be just a good reason to celebrate, but it becomes better, as it was actually chosen as the best firewall solution!
• Security researcher Russ McRee found a security vulnerability in eBox during last month, which was promptly solved. Although we cannot be proud of any security vulnerability in eBox, it is definitely an important milestone that security experts start to specifically look for issues in our technology.
• The average number of eBox downloads during the past 6 months has more than doubled last year’s average. We are now close to 30,000 downloads per month, which looks like a pretty good number. Last month at LinuxTag I attended a presentation by Larry Augustin claiming that SugarCRM had 60,000 downloads per month. This means that eBox, without the $30M+ in VC funds of SugarCRM, has managed to reach almost half of their numbers. I agree the comparison is not direct: a small business server is not the same product as a CRM, but we are both aiming at the SMB server market, which makes the comparison still valid.

So, things seem to be accelerating now. In my view, there is still a lot of work to do to get to that tipping point, but we are getting closer everyday. This would be a good timing for us to reassess our identity and make sure that all our communication elements are right and in place, before any further change becomes painfully costly.

Entry Filed under: Market. .