Marketing Team

We are the Nix marketing team, and our mission to help grow the Nix user base.

Why we want growth

Growth is instrumental to something. What is that?

We strive to advance the state of the art in software engineering. That’s why we’re using and contributing to Nix.

Ultimately, we’re interested in using and making software that is:

  • more up-to-date
  • more reliable
  • easier to distribute
  • easier to integrate
  • easier to collaborate on.

We cannot achieve this alone. As the Nix marketing team, we believe that talking about work done is as important as doing the work. This is where we can help the Nix ecosystem to thrive.

We’re convinced that the more people know about Nix, the more people will use Nix, and the more people will become contributors and maintainers. We want to serve those people who are indispensable for maintaining and developing the Nix ecosystem, by promoting their work and facilitating communication with a wider audience.

How we want to grow

Our strategy is for the Nix ecosystem to become known for something unique we already excel at. This is what we will emphasize in order to attract users.

This is not to set directions for development, but simply recognizing and leveraging current strengths.

Target audience

Our target audience are software developers.

Nix tooling already fits developer use cases most closely, and it is developers who will derive the most value from using Nix in its current state. Developers are also more likely to become contributors, and eventually maintainers. Finally, among our users, software professionals have the greatest influence on organizations that can provide the resources necessary to keep developing and maintaining the Nix ecosystem.

Communication strategy

Nix can do many things. If we start to talk about all of those things at once, the message gets lost.

For example: There is only a limited amount of space on the landing page. We will choose a narrow set of topics that best serve our purpose of increasing adoption most effectively. The particular focus may change over time as we move through the adoption life cycle for our target audience.

How to measure growth

In order to know where we’re going, we need to know where we are.

Therefore, we will first collect metrics relevant to our mission, separated into phases in the user journey:

Discovery phase

  • Google Search trends
  • Social media impressions
  • Visits to the landing page

User phase

  • Number of members and messages on the community platforms (Discourse, Matrix, GitHub)
  • Binary cache usage
  • Number of queries on search.nixos.org
  • Website statistics on documentation
  • Community surveys

Contribution phase

  • Number of contributors and forks
  • Number of opened issues and pull requests

Supporting contributors and community teams with outreach

If you’re working on improving the Nix ecosystem, the marketing team is there to help you reach your audience.

  • We encourage every team to produce a live stream or video recording once in a while.

    Get in touch to access our StreamYard account for broadcasting to

  • Send us your announcements to be included in the monthly newsletter

  • Send us your questions to be included in the yearly community survey

Activities

Media outreach

  • More posts on social media
  • Revive the newsletter
    • One post per month
  • Publish more videos
  • Write a content policy
    • What to include, what not to; which language to use; define audience personae

Community Survey

  • Goal: publish in June

Long-term goals

  • Set up continuous collection and presentation of metrics
  • Develop communication strategy and adoption plan for the Nix platform
  • Establish a communication workflow to support community teams with outreach
  • Support appearances in podcasts, interviews, conferences, …
  • Publish 12 newsletters per year
  • Publish 4 video updates per year

Get in touch

We are looking for additional members. We would especially appreciate support by people interested in frontend development, content creation for social media, and technical writing.

We would like to see the team being assembled from every corner of a Nix community. To join the team please write an email to webmaster@nixos.org trying to answer the following questions:

  • Why would you like to join the team?
  • Why are you interested in marketing Nix?
  • What drives you?
  • How would you contribute to the marketing team?
  • What is your idea of what the marketing team will work on, this year? Next year? Next 5 years?
  • What could be a few easy fixes to the website that would solve problems that you heard others complain about Nix/NixOS?

The answers are actually not used to judge people if they are good enough to join, but to understand the person joining, their intent and their vision. Since we will discuss many things that could be very bikeshedding, it is important that we understand each other’s position and the context they are arguing from.

Meetings

You can expect at meetings to discuss things first in an abstract manner (what are our goals) and only then get into more concrete proposals (how do we achieve goals). Meetings will be scheduled as needed and as much as the team has time, but at least once a month. Initially, it might happen that we will meet more often until the whole idea of what a marketing team is/does is bootstrapped. Minutes of the meetings will be published with the potential agenda and the date of the next meeting.