What is the business value of a Github Star?
What does a Github Star mean in terms of business value and which Star might be more valuable than others. In times every marketing dollar needs to show value, let us find answers to such questions.
Github repos often value themselves on metrics such as stars, watch, and forks. While these metrics definitely have a positive correlation to the overall popularity and usefulness of a repo, marketers are still demystifying what is the business value of such actions. The reason why this dilemma exists is because a stargazer could be that ideal potential customer, who really appreciates the repository, has deployed the OSS product in their large enterprise organization and now has all the reasons to move to a commercial version of the product; or they just might be a non-relevant user, who might be even far from a developer profile the Open Source organization aims at. And Dev Marketers need to make sense out of thousands of actions in their Github repos to find out relevant signals from noise.
Secondly, analyzing Github data beyond a certain point is expensive. For example, if you want to learn the Github user’s organization, email ID, social profiles, or any other contact handle, you might have to use multiple and expensive enrichment tools or even manual methods to derive that. This can only be done once you know a Github signal is truly worth going after.
Also, any medium to highly popular Github repo will have thousands of such stars or watchers and for marketers it becomes a problem of many. How do they know which signup is worth pursuing more? Where is a real opportunity?
Not all Github Stars are created equal
The value of the Github Star essentially depends on who is the developer (organization, designation, influence) who is Starring the repository and in what context (lurking → experimenting → actively seeking solution → actively evaluating a product) is the developer Starring it. Hence we have listed methods here to discover which Github Stars are more valuable than others:
Tracking User Actions in Competitive and Complimentary Open Source Repos
One great way to know the value of a Github activity such as Star, Watch, Fork and more in your Open Source repo is to track if similar activities were done by the same Github ID in competitive or complimentary Github repos around the same time period.
That is great signal to learn whether the developer is evaluating a tool or finding solutions to certain problem their organization or project is facing. If the developer has actively done certain actions in competing or complimentary repositories, there could be an active sales opportunity within the organization.
Tracking User Actions within your repo/ community
Another way to obtain value of a Github Star is to discover how engaged that developer is around your product ecosystem.
Is the same developer doing other actions on your repo? You can know this by tracking the actions of the developer’s Github ID in and around your repo.
Has this developer done activities in your website such as signing up for your product trial (if you have a cloud version) or any of the marketing activities and events. Knowing this is easier if you have the developer email ID or use their First Name and Last Name from Github and run a fuzzy match with your CRM data.
PS: Using a “Github signup” button in your forms for product trials or any marketing activity can be another smart way of mapping a user’s Github ID to your CRM data. You will have to build a Github App for it, but if you have a strong open source strategy, this might be very useful. Here is an article that goes into depth of building such apps.
Is the developer active in any of the developer communities relevant to you?
Uncovering Developer’s Organization Fitment
Uncovering the Developer’s organization can be challenging, and we have written more about ways to get this data in this article. But once you get there; your Github Star signals can be analyzed in two ways:
Finding the organization fitment: Is the organization the right fit for your company? Because if it is, this can be a great data point for a potential lead, since you can clearly track that a developer from a relevant organization is interacting with your open source repository.
Triangulate activity from other developers within the same organization: Have more developers from the same organization stargazed/ watched/ forked your repo, or have they been also doing certain actions in your competitive or complimentary repos?
Once you have this data, you will be in a much better position to learn how many of your Github Stars actually have a business value and hence are worth focusing. You can even build your simple scoring models based on the above parameters to understand which Github stars have more value compared to others.
What happens once you know which Github Stars are more valuable
This is where we make the whole thing a lot more fun (and slightly complex)! The value of intent data to a marketer is not just to know ‘who’ are the potential customers but also ‘how’ to get more of such potential customers and which developer marketing campaigns or activities brought the more valuable ones.
What if we analyzed the Github Stars as a function of time and mapped them to the developer marketing / devrel campaigns or activities conducted? Since now we know the value of a Star, we can interpret which campaign correlates to higher value Github Stars.
Understanding the business value of Github Stars is an ongoing challenge for marketers, but there are ways to navigate the sea of data and find relevant signals. As mentioned above, not all Github stars are equal. The key is to not just look at the Github Star as a metric but as a signal of intent and dive deep into the developer's identity and context in which your repository was stargazed.
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