[Catalyst-dev] Catalyst Marketing Plan Draft

Wed Oct 18 10:10:13 CEST 2006

Hi all,

That is a great news!

Answering your question if there is something else I see one such
thing.  I'll start with a story and then proceed with a more analytic
view.

Let's assume you are a programmer, you have your idea for your great
application and you want to code a working prototype that you could
show to a non-developer.  With Rails you can code it by yourself and
not be ashamed by it's ugliness when you finish.  With Catalyst you
would have to hire some designer.

There is the economic term of complementary product - a complementary
product to programmers work is a nice design.   The theory says that
the value of a product is higher when the price of the complement is
low - so if we want us programmers to be paid well we need to have the
design for cheap - and what is cheaper than having it for free with
the library that you use?

Thus what I would like to add to the marketing plan would be procuring
some nice templates that would be bundled with Catalyst for easy use
by the programmer.

--
Zbyszek

On 10/17/06, John Wang <johncwang at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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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>
>
>

-- 
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/