Most developers (any developers) have little to no exposure to the world of marketing.  In Open Source project, developers are doing this for fun and on their own time- which usually means they want to write code and make cool new features.  But why are you building this cool amazing software, if no one is going to use it? Marketing can be tedious but it really is essential for both increasing user adoption of a project and recruiting new devs to help work on the project.

The Big Data Apache projects of the late 2000s-early 2010s (e.g. Hadoop and Spark) were wildly popular- however they both solved a very painful business problem AND had professional marketing departments behind them.  For most smaller projects, this falls back on developers and other community members.  

In this talk we’ll discuss, the “path users/developers take to find your project”, the open source “purchase funnel” (getting someone to become aware, interested in, trying out, and becoming a contributor to your project), tactical considerations such as SEO, Google Adwords, Twitter campaigns, overall cohesive messaging, and more- all through a case study around Apache Mahout which after becoming extremely popular in the early 2010’s, fell out of popularity (a victim of professional marketing from other projects, among other things), refactored, and now has a unique problem of being a well known name in Big Data, but known for something it no longer does (run on Hadoop).