How to Make Your Program Popular

Speaker: Inge Wallin

Find that your application rocks but nobody uses it? Think that your project is incredibly cool, but still have difficulties getting new developers on the team? Go to this presentation and make your application the most popular one on the open source block!

KDE applications are often very good and sometimes the best of breed of the free applications. On the other hand, KDE applications tend to be pretty unknown outside the KDE world. An excellent example of this is Kontact, the KDE personal information package containing Kmail, KOrganizer, KAddressBook and a number of other nice applications. The reason for that is most often that there is no or too little marketing done around the program.

One notable exception is KOffice, that has become pretty well known as a good package of its own during the last year. The reason for that is a focused marketing effort with a thought-out strategy behind it.

Marketing a free program is not difficult. On the most basic level, the only thing you have to do is to tell people that the application exists. This can be done in a number of ways that we will try to expand on.

In this talk, Inge Wallin, the KOffice marketing coordinator, will explain the strategy behind the KOffice marketing campaign and how you can use the same methods to make your own program more well known and popular.

The talk will cover the following points:

• Some terms of the trade: Marketing, promotion, other stuff
• Different ways to promote your product.
• Positioning - You need to take a position!
• Promotion channels - Newspapers, magazines, tech news sites
• How to talk to journalists

We will mostly talk about marketing to the users, but will also cover marketing your application to new developers.

If you follow my advice and still don't have the most popular application after a year at next aKademy, you will get your money back and also get the chance to berate me at the next aKademy!

Inge Wallin

Inge Wallin is a M.Sc. in Computer Science from Linköping University in Sweden. He co-founded Cendio AB in 1992, a company which today is the oldest Open Source company in the world, at least as far as he knows. Inge worked as CEO for 9 years and is now a senior systems engineer. He is a member of the board of directors of Cendio AB and Ingate Systems AB.

Inges contributions to KDE have been mainly in kdegames, kdeedu and KOffice. He is the maintainer of KChart in KOffice and KReversi, and has been functioning as the KOffice marketing coordinator (also known as the marketing dude) since aKademy 2005 in Malaga.

Interests outside KDE and computers are Aikido and different forms of sports as well as playing the ancient game of go and other board games.

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