[Catalyst-dev] Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft

[John Wang]

The Catalyst project has created a marketing team in addition to the dev and
doc teams. Currently jshirley and I are in marketing and anyone else who is
interested is welcome to join. Marketing serves to promote the product
(including docs) so it's important everyone is on the same page. My
intention is for marketing tasks to be defined the Marketing Plan and agreed
upon with the dev and doc teams. Once there is agreement, marketing can
start executing against the plan.

I've put together a plan in a MS Word doc that I've attached and paraphrased
below. Basically we need to come to agreement on some high level decisions
before any action can be taken. For now, I'm using MS Word because I like
and am used to their outline numbering system. I can make it available in
PDF if preferred. I paraphrased the content in this email this time around
and will probably continue to do so for things that need decisions but the
intention is for the full plan to live in that document.

The tasks include defining the target audience and the product.

1) Which of the following groups should be the target audience:
  1.1) All web application developers including non-OO PHP and Rails
  1.2) MVC/OO framework developers
  1.3) All Perl devs
  1.4) Perl devs with a clue

We need agreement on this because it has been debated as to what types of
users Catalyst wants to attract, if any. People will have their individual
opinions but we need Catalyst dev+doc+mktg to come to an agreement and for
all three groups to accept that target audience as a driver in goal setting.

I think Catalyst needs to target all web app developers but this means docs
geared towards non-Perl users as well as making it easier for people to
install without CPAN, etc. Because of this marketing cannot make this
decision alone.

How should we, as a group, decide on this?

2) What is the elevator pitch for Catalyst

An "elevator pitch" is the short sales message you can tell soemone in an
elevator ride to get them interested in your product. This will depend on
who we decide is the target audience. I think it should be something along
the lines of:

"The most scalable and flexible web framework backed by the largest open
source library"

This is geared towards non-Perl users as well as management types. We have
the users and the technology to back it up.

3) What is the Catalyst Solution Bundle

People are interested in the entire solution not just the framework so while
Cat is very flexible and has lots of options from a marketing perspective we
need to start pushing one recommended solution. From a marketing perspective
on the website, all these components will be marketed as part of the
Catalyst solution while mentioning components can be swapped out.

In the past, this was Task::Catalyst. The issues:

  3.1) Can we get control of Task::Catalyst
  3.2) Are these still the right components
  3.3) There should be a recommended cache compoent

The solution bundle will need to be supported by doc and dev to make the
bundle as seamless and productive as possible.

4) Does the Catalyst solution need anything else to support the message

If we are going to pitch Catalyst as a great solution, the product needs to
match the expectations generated:

  4.1) If we decide to target non-Perl users, can we make the Catalyst
solution super easy to install for someone who doesn't know how to use CPAN?
Should have Cat easily installed into a MyApp/vendor directory?
  4.2) Built-in caching that you can just turn on seems to be a selling
feature for other frameworks. While Cat has plugins, should we have a
recommended plugin and the ability to just turn it on and have the Cat app
save cached content to a MyApp/tmp/cache directory?
  4.3) Documentation on writing tests for Cat apps. One of the big features
of frameworks is that they make you use better coding practices including
writing tests. I think we need some recommendations and documentation on how
to write common tests for Cat apps using Test::Class, Test::MockObject and
the like. Right now we have the source for existing tests and POD for
Test::WWW::(Mechanize|Selenium)::Catalyst. Should have have tutorials on
using these?

Is there anything else?

The information in this email is a parapharsing of a MS Word doc I put
together and am attaching. It's also available at:

http://www.dev411.com/catalyst/CatalystMarketingPlan_draft.doc

Let me know what you think of the above and how we should come to concensus.

-- 
John Wang
http://www.dev411.com/blog/
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