#648 - Tell stories, and reach out to big business clients
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By Chris Graham
- Added
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| Identifier | #648 |
|---|---|
| Issue type | Feature request or suggestion |
| Title | Tell stories, and reach out to big business clients |
| Status | Closed (no changes needed) |
| Handling member | Chris Graham |
| Addon | General / Uncategorised |
| Description | We make lots of claims about how awesome Composr is, but we don't make a very good job of proving this via stories and press releases.
When someone does a good Composr job for an established business, we need to show how they got something much better than they would have got via one of our more mainstream competitors. Give stats, and human interest, and publish and syndicate this. This requires lots of time investment. We can't just jot some notes down and dump them online, it requires probably a few days work on each case study, and that then needs to get shopped around to key people to grow the ecosystem. What we really need is big clients coming in to the ecosystem (not just to ocProducts as clients, but other development organisations using Composr). This hasn't really happened - Composr is popular with enthusiasts (ratings going up since v8 btw - usually people rate us 5/5 on comparison sites), and ocProducts clients tend to be small businesses. We need to get our foot in the door in major companies, and then we can hire account managers and dedicated resources (programmers) for these major companies -- and therefore as a side effect of that push Composr development forward harder. We want clients who otherwise would just be going via some expensive agency who would (for example) use Drupal, and then invoice huge amounts of money to the client for all the costs they'd be having (all the time putting things together, sending people off to conferences for training, maintenance time, lots of extra development time, etc). The problem is, if we don't prove why Composr is better, and go direct to clients, we're not going to be known and/or believed by them - being better is not good enough in itself because we're fighting a whole system where the clients don't know the CMS landscape and the agencies are very happy to use accepted stuff regardless of price (higher price = more profit for them, in fact). Typically we've gone with relatively low budget work, but that is a problem. These kinds of clients (who I have huge personal respect for - I'll be clear about that - it's actually what drives me) typically can't give referrals as they don't have many business connections; having a stream of specialist low-budget work for micro/small-businesses makes growth really hard. The bottom-end/volume of the market wants something REALLY simple, so Wordpress commands control of this anyway. Money in the Drupal ecosystem, but also many others (e.g. typo3, or commercial systems), flows around like water, relatively speaking. The annual Drupal association budget is $3mil, and that's not even really for coding (who knows how much the some total pay is for all the people contributing to Drupal is, but it is probably over £100mil just in terms of time spend maintaining contributions). Big business projects of £1mil are not unusual. We don't need anything close to that money to keep making Composr more and more awesome, but right now typical users would think £500 is a lot of money (about 1 days salary, company-cost wise), which is 1/6000th of that Drupal association budget, and 1/200000th of my prior estimate for total pay to Drupal contributors. Also of note is that companies like Acquia and Autommatic have veteran CEOs with decades of experience and huge teams of people marketing the software off of 10's of $mil of venture capital. All kinds of peripheral venture capital backed projects are constantly popping up with similar amounts of money (hosting services, etc). Now, given that this commercialisation really taints these CMSs (IMHO!), and there are too many cooks, and huge amounts of chaos, I don't have a problem with that as it is an opportunity to us to keep focusing on a combination of power, cost-effectiveness and simplicity - but it also is a reflection of the competition Composr has. |
| Steps to reproduce | |
| Additional information | ocProducts has typically done a pretty poor job of reaching bigger business. Unfortunately we founded in a city that is a heavy-industry graveyard and hanging on now as an academic and retail centre, with higher than average unemployment, not a modern business centre or government centre (hey, call it inexperience on my part ;) but I was fond of this place). So the economic problems really have hit hard here. For principled reasons we haven't gone out to take in large investments, because we don't want the platform to be tainted by over-commercialisation (e.g. the need to dumb down to a common-denominator and erode Composr's unique don't-need-to-be-a-programmer flexibility), which would then become necessary. We also don't have many personal connections to big business to get introductions. It's actually really amazing that we're a top CMS without having had all the big investment and huge numbers of contributors that others have had - but we need all to try harder to make sure we can keep raising our game. If we don't raise our game, we'll still be a top CMS because there's nothing like Composr - but we'd fall behind in areas of refinement, given how much money competitors have to put in. It's certainly a personal priority once my schedule is freed up.
My reason for writing this publicly on the tracker, rather than the usual private staff discussion we might have internally, is I want other people's views on this, and for it to be represented as a task that people can see they can contribute on. If people have connections to big businesses with good budgets and a need for what Composr can do, and a desire to have highly skilled developers doing a better more maintainable job, for less money, we need people helping open doors for us. But we don't want to be the only significant commercial Composr developer either, so equally I would like to spur others on. |
| Funded? | No |
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Comments
A lot of people might be surprised by me referring to Drupal as an established competitor. People would think of it as a newcomer.
Perhaps before, not now. I think Drupal has come in and it has lowered budgets a bit, in some cases (I don't have stats to be honest!). But I think the main appeal is people like Open Source, and people like how much you can do with Drupal you can't do with closed source (remember with closed source you basically have to pay the software developer to do just about ANYTHING, at least to some extent).
All that applies to Composr of course too, except Composr provides far greater value for money. My point is Drupal is now established, but it was not really established because the market was looking to save money. Just because we provide better value, doesn't mean people will lap Composr up -- anyone with enterprise business experience knows that actually higher prices are often a motivator, and there are many reasons for that.
If people are looking for value, right now they'll probably use Wordpress or Joomla. People are used to them. Composr used to be harder, not so much now, but traditionally. Composr isn't really in that market - we allow more sophisticated sites with greater ease, but mostly these user-bases want very basic stuff with just one or two extras. Of course, there are people who use a tonne of addons - and they should use Composr instead - but they are a minority. The real competition is Drupal and the like, where people are doing complex stuff routinely, but inefficiently.
In other words, Composr isn't the common-denominator. So we won't take the bottom of the market, we'll never be able make Composr so simple that our advantages can be leveraged with Wordpress simplicity. Composr is the better sophisticated solution. But the barrier to us there is that Drupal, or commercial CMSs, are very established compared to us - and price and quality are not the gateway to enterprise, marketing and establishment are. That is what this tracker issue is all about.