Marketing

they can't use something if they don't know it exists

Learning Objectives

• Distinguish between marketing, sales, and support.
• Write a one-paragraph description of your project aimed at a specific audience.
• Identify one concrete action to make your project easier to find and adopt.

Before

Jess discovered the problem when a colleague forwarded her a grant proposal citing "RodentSim, a widely-used simulator for mammal range change". RodentSim wasn't Jess's simulator; it was a tool developed by a lab in Germany that had apparently been doing similar work for three years. The German lab had published a software paper, registered the tool in two ecological software registries, and written a clear one-page description of what it did. Jess's simulator existed only as a GitHub repository with a README that said, "Simulator for rodent range changes. Contact Jess for details."

Jess's simulator was faster, more accurate, and better documented, but nobody outside her immediate circle knew it existed. Researchers who were looking for exactly what it provided were finding something else instead, and describing that something else in their grant proposals.

What Marketing Is(n't)

"Marketing" has a bad reputation in academic circles, but it just means making sure that the people you could help know you exist and understand what you can do for them [Kuchner2011]. If you don't do this, then either someone else will describe your software for you (usually incorrectly) or nobody will talk about it at all.

Three activities often get confused with each other:

• Marketing (awareness): someone learns you exist and roughly what you do.
• Sales (adoption): someone goes from "this looks interesting" to "I'm using it."
• Support (success): someone who is already using it keeps being able to use it.

Each addresses a different stage in the adoption pipeline, and all three are necessary. A project can have great awareness and terrible adoption because the first-contact experience is broken; equally, it can have great adoption and terrible retention because there's nowhere to get help.

Writing a Pitch

A pitch is not a list of features. It is a description of who has a specific problem, how they currently deal with it, and why your software makes their lives better. The test is whether you can explain this in one sentence to someone outside your field. Jess's current pitch fails this test: when she says, "It's a simulator for rodent range changes," Nobody outside ecology knows what that means or why they should care.

The same software needs different descriptions for different audiences:

• A graduate student working in the area wants to know if it will run on their laptop, if there examples to start from, and if anyone else has used it successfully.
• A senior researcher wants to know if it's maintained, if it has a citable paper, and whether adopting it will cost their group time they don't have.
• A program officer wants to know about impact and sustainability.

The things that cost almost nothing help the most:

• A CITATION.cff file so people know how to credit you.
• One example in the README that runs in under five minutes.
• One blog post or short paper describing a real use case rather than the software itself.
• Answering questions on whatever forum you want people to use.

After

After discovering RodentSim, Jess spent one afternoon doing three things: registering the simulator in two ecological software registries, adding a CITATION.cff file, and writing a 200-word description of the simulator aimed at graduate students in ecology. She sent the description to two colleagues and asked them to tell her what they still didn't understand. Both of them had the same question, so she rewrote the description. Within three months, the simulator was being mentioned in grant proposals.

Scientists feel marketing is beneath them, and grant committees sometimes reinforce this by treating "impact" as an afterthought. But your actual audience for grant proposals—program officers who are not specialists in your subfield—needs the same thing your users need: a clear statement of what you built, who it helps, and why it works better than the alternative. Writing pitches for different audiences is practice for writing grant proposals.

Exercises

Write Three Pitches (12 min)

Prompt the LLM with something like this:

Write three one-paragraph descriptions of this research software project for three different audiences: (1) a graduate student in [field] looking for a tool, (2) a senior researcher deciding whether to recommend it to their group, and (3) a funding agency program officer. The software does [one sentence]. Its main advantage over alternatives is [one sentence].

Run the prompt, read each paragraph in the response, and check for factual errors. Does the "main advantage" actually match your software?

Write One More Pitch (5 min)

Pick the one person you most need to reach. Rewrite that paragraph from scratch specifically for them. What do they actually care about? What would make them skeptical? What don't you know about how they will evaluate your project?

Objection Handling (8 min)

Pair up. One person picks one of the three roles, reads the other person's statement, and asks a question or raises an objection that it doesn't answer. Switch roles and repeat the exercise, then rewrite your pitches.