Seth Godin has some advice to marketeers and businesses that open source proejcts should take to heart as well. Godin writes today about embracing the “lifetime value” of a customer. Open source projects may not have customers, but it pays to think about the lifetime value of users as well.
Godin writes “Instead of comparing what you invest to the benefit you receive from the first bill, the first visit, the first transaction, it’s important to not only recognize but embrace the true lifetime value of one more customer.”
That’s equally true of users of open source projects. Contributors to projects are valued and recognized. But all too often, users are ignored and seen as a sort of side-effect of producing software. Yes, they can have it too, but really, it’s a contributors-only (and often developers-only) club. Many projects are starting to recognize the problem and are seeing that at least some of the users now are the next round of contributors.
