Open-source strategy: Documentation = dollars
Ian Howells, Alfresco's Chief Marketing Officer, just shared with me some intriguing data that I thought would be useful for more than just Alfresco. I've long suspected that documentation was a key driver of purchases in open source, and here's some data that confirms this view:
(Credit:
Alfresco)
To make sense of the graphic, it's helpful to note some nomenclature we use:
- "Hosted Trial" is just what it sounds like: a trial of the Alfresco (Enterprise) software in a hosted fashion;
- "Enterprise Trial" is when the prospect downloads our Enterprise code (Certified, tested binary of our open-source code - think Red Hat Enterprise Linux versus our Fedora, which we call "Alfresco Community").
With these in mind, the vast majority of our deals are fed by two direct sources: those who read our documentation and those who actually download and try our Enterprise code. Now, we also know that most of these people first start with our Community code (and often evaluate it for months, reading documentation and visiting our website in the meantime).
What does this mean? It means that if our demand generation software is telling us that someone has both read documentation and evaluated Enterprise, the odds of them buying support from Alfresco are huge. We want to be calling that prospect immediately.
But it also means that documentation is a huge opportunity for open-source companies to drive sales. Documentation is often treated as the shabby cousin of software development, but it is really the essential link between development and dollars. It's hard to motivate good documentation.
Software development without documentation is self-centric. Documentation is a signal that the developer actually cares about her downstream users. For projects that actually want downstream users, write good documentation. It won't cannibalize buyers: it will create them.
On this topic, it's important to have open-source company websites heavy on product information, and light on fluff. Here's where people spend time on Alfresco's website:
(Credit:
Alfresco)
People don't visit a software company's website to read about the executives. They visit the website to get information on the software. If your website is light on that information, you're killing sales, especially in an open-source software company.
Transparency and information are the lifeblood of open source. Funny how different this is from the old software world. Yes, I know many of these companies are superlative examples of providing information, but mostly information that is packaged by the company (i.e., skewed in its favor). Open source provides information on the information's terms, not the companies'.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
We're in a quandry at the moment on a planned company wide adoption of Sharepoint where the pilot is far from doing what we want it to do - so my step one was to register on the Alfresco site and to find a book on Amazon (the Phil Windley podcast one of your folks did sounded very impressive). Then baulked at it's cost and the fact it's over 600 pages long. I ended up buying "The Jelly Effect" instead :-)
I have an uphill battle to get things switched but haven't yet even attempted to start the journey...
Ian W.
I find the "Trial" data very interesting. If I'm reading the chart correctly, you guys get 30% of deals from the < 5% of leads that start via Trials.
It's strange that the ratio is skewed the other way for a Hosted Trial. Could that be because folks that are willing to go through the 'trouble' of installing and setting up the product are more likely to follow through with product use and later, subscription purchase?
What is the difference between Trial, Enterprise Trial, Hosted Trial & Other? (You defined ET & HT, but not Trial or Other).
As for "Other," it refers to other ways that people evaluate Alfresco. Those are people contacting us or our partners directly, or through trade shows (etc.).
- Great post
- by Noah Clements September 10, 2007 1:58 PM PDT
- What an excellent and informative post! Thank you for sharing your internal information. I wonder if you see Documentation as the element that converts free riders into customers and contributors (if so, how does that work?), or if you see Documentation as the extra sales kicker?
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(4 Comments)From the closing contrasting the openness with proprietary systems, it seemed that you think the sales breakdown is different for proprietary software systems? Why would that be? (I don't know if it is or is not). Wouldn't those systems for which there is a lot of documentation do better than those for which there is not?