Reach out to companies

[chadwhitacre]

This ticket is for @cakey and myself and anyone else potentially interested in recruiting new companies to use Gittip as a way to invest in open-source and market to developers.

A decade ago, under the influence of a business mentor of mine, I made a list of all the school districts in Western Pennsylvania and methodically cold-called each one to offer our web design services. We got one hit, and I still do work for that company to this day and have in fact become friends with my contact there.

We should do the same with companies.

• develop a straightforward pitch at /about/companies/, see /about/companies/ #894
• compile a list of companies to reach out to
• methodically contact each of them

Want to back this issue? Post a bounty on it! We accept bounties via Bountysource.

[cakey]

Good initiative.

A good place to start would be to look at existing gittip users and identify prominent employers. It's obviously a far easier sell to go though an already convinced developer (see @jeresig's great work with khan academy for example)

[chadwhitacre]

@cakey Good call. Do you want to take this on?

[mvdkleijn]

I'd like to take a stab at this, or at least bullet number 1.. Do we still want it at /for/companies?

After that I can start making a list of local (Netherlands) companies. Some big names like Atlassian (they have an office here), Phillips, IBM, etc.

[zbynekwinkler]

👍 That (I mean all 3 points) would be something right along the lines Paul Graham is describing in Do Things that Don't Scale. To get the employers of current gittip users we could look at github accounts - the user provided company name could be in the public info with the key "company". Otherwise LinkedIn integration would be a possible next step - are we planning that?

[mvdkleijn]

We can chase after employers of Gittip users, but I thought about playing the "you use open source software, want to reward people for it?" tactic... It would be nice if Gittip funds were available and we had a "global fund" (i.e. spread it out over all Gittip receivers)

Personally I wouldn't like LinkedIn integration much. I have a LinkedIn account but its become more and more a hotbed of spam and unwanted cold-calling, etc.

[chadwhitacre]

Too generic.

[patcon]

Calls:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amrUaghuobk
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkzi7TlsNec

[chadwhitacre]

Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnlTj8ZmKiuDqi8bjXxkyMW8N9qNiS6oh

[chadwhitacre]

IRC

[chadwhitacre]

The two things companies want are to a) get stuff done, and b) build their reputation.

Gittip helps with getting stuff done by directing funds to projects that your company depends on. This is probably cheaper than paying internal engineers to do the same work.

Gittip helps with building reputation through the currently vaporous Gittip ad network (#1513).

[chadwhitacre]

+1 on HN:

The company giving the biggest amount of money is giving $1095... you should try to involve Mozilla and other big non-profits to donate, basically because giving monthly money to open-source (non-employees) devs is one of the boldest statements they can make in favor of open-source.

[chadwhitacre]

Great list of companies to reach out to is shaping up at https://github.com/ossfriendly/open-source-sponsors.

[mattbk]

Would love to see Gratipay itself on that list once it's more solvent.

[chadwhitacre]

Closing in favor of gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#1170 which is on the (more appropriate) Inside Gratipay repo.