Introduce aggregation story w/ npm announcement(s)

[chadwhitacre]

Follows on gratipay/gratipay.com#4427. How are we going to promote this new feature?

• gratipay.news post: https://gratipay.news/integrating-npm-39333109419d
• push to blogs
  • https://thenewstack.io/contact/
  • http://fossforce.com/contact/
  • https://fossbytes.com/fossbytes-team/
  • https://itsfoss.com/about/
• Twitter: one, two
• IRC / Slack channels:
  • Changelog slack
  • Indie.vc slack
  • freenode#npm
  • freenode##Node.js
  • freenode##javascript—getting some engagement
• 1-on-1 email—punting to Email maintainers about available money #969
• on-site notification: update the "★ announcement ★" link gratipay.com#4149
• HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14360935 purged, retry later
• Product Hunt—need a landing page first
• https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/

[chadwhitacre]

The most immediate marketing message here is that it is now much easier for npm packages to apply to join Gratipay as projects.

I'm inclined to use this opportunity to start telling our story around aggregation and the three-sided marketplace. On the one hand that telegraphs our strategy to our fellow travelers, but on the other hand with this release we'll be a step ahead on this path, and I think we want to start building awareness
around this story so that we can see if there's any resonance in the marketplace. I think we have a unique take on the problem and that we're building something cool, but at this point we are very much in search of product-market fit.

Here's a blog post stub.

[chadwhitacre]

Bumping this up a level in scope from project to epic.

[chadwhitacre]

Post: https://gratipay.news/integrating-npm-39333109419d.

[chadwhitacre]

We'll need some kind of discovery mechanism (search will probably be easier than bulk, though both would be nice) before we can go live with that.

[chadwhitacre]

Search PR in gratipay/gratipay.com#4458.

[chadwhitacre]

I did some outreach on Slack/IRC and have also posted to HN.

I guess let's track uptake here?

gratipay::DATABASE=> select count(*) from teams_to_packages;
┌───────┐
│ count │
├───────┤
│     5 │
└───────┘
(1 row)

[chadwhitacre]

Leaving open to retry on HN.

[chadwhitacre]

@jdorfman to submit to Product Hunt once we have a landing page.

[rohitpaulk]

gratipay::DATABASE=> select count(*) from teams_to_packages;
 count
-------
     9
(1 row)

[chadwhitacre]

Our second order of magnitude! 💃

gratipay::DATABASE=> select count(*) from teams_to_packages;
┌───────┐
│ count │
├───────┤
│    10 │
└───────┘
(1 row)

And the person that put us over the top is the founder of npm! 😱 🙀 😍 😻

[chadwhitacre]

Adding https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/ alongside HN and Product Hunt as places to go for our next push.

[chadwhitacre]

We're flat.

gratipay::DATABASE=> select count(distinct(owner)) as nowners, count(team_id) as npackages from teams_to_packages tp join teams t on tp.team_id = t.id;
┌─────────┬───────────┐
│ nowners │ npackages │
├─────────┼───────────┤
│       7 │        10 │
└─────────┴───────────┘
(1 row)

[chadwhitacre]

slack

[jdorfman]

@whit537 landing page for reddit too.

[chadwhitacre]

landing page for reddit too.

Separate or same as for Product Hunt?

[chadwhitacre]

I've started making progress on gratipay/gratipay.com#4488. How about we aim to deploy that next week, and then make an HN/PH/Reddit push starting on Tuesday, June 13th?

cc: @jdorfman @Jaimeyann @clone1018 @rohitpaulk @mattbk et al.

[chadwhitacre]

Testing the Product Hunt waters ...

---

---

---

[chadwhitacre]

gratipay::DATABASE=> select count(distinct(owner)) as nowners, count(team_id) as npackages from teams_to_packages tp join teams t on tp.team_id = t.id;
┌─────────┬───────────┐
│ nowners │ npackages │
├─────────┼───────────┤
│       9 │        14 │
└─────────┴───────────┘
(1 row)

[chadwhitacre]

I think we should not push to HN/PH/Reddit until we clean things up a lot more. Marketing on Twitter and IRC/Slack/email should be enough to start getting some traffic. The thing about HN/PH is that it seems more one-shot. I think we wait until things are tighter and we're more like beta quality because right now we're more like alpha quality.

[chadwhitacre]

I've started writing a post to announce package.json discovery.

https://gratipay.news/pay-for-your-package-json-cb07341445ca

Here's the script I used to compute the 48% with 2+ and 7% with 10+ figures (based on a dump of the emails field from the packages table):

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from __future__ import absolute_import, division, print_function, unicode_literals

import csv
from collections import defaultdict

counts = defaultdict(int)

for rec in csv.reader(open('emails.csv')):
    emails = rec[0].decode('utf8')[1:-1].split(',')
    for email in emails:
        counts[email] += 1

nmany = nmulti = 0
for email in counts:
    if counts[email] > 10:
        nmany += 1
    if counts[email] > 1:
        nmulti += 1
total = len(counts)

print(nmany , total, nmany / total)
print(nmulti, total, nmulti / total)

[chadwhitacre]

gratipay/gratipay.com#4507 is in! Last call for input on the "Pay for your package.json" announcement.

[chadwhitacre]

+2 from @jdorfman @mattbk in slack.

[chadwhitacre]

https://gratipay.news/pay-for-your-package-json-cb07341445ca
https://twitter.com/Gratipay/status/875755128866971650

[chadwhitacre]

I'm going to go ahead and close this out since the first pieces are out. There will be ongoing additional marketing tasks that can have their own tickets.