Marketing push for npm integration

[chadwhitacre]

was: Be in npm weekly

I had lunch with five people from npm, Inc. yesterday (I was out there for #920). One of them was the director of sales and marketing, Jonathan Cowperthwait, with whom I discussed a mention in the npm weekly about Gratipay's recent integration of npm.

[chadwhitacre]

Subject: Gratipay in npm weekly?

Hi, John!

Following up on lunch yesterday (thanks again!) about the idea of including Gratipay in an upcoming npm weekly. Here are the two posts we've got up about our integration:

https://gratipay.news/integrating-npm-39333109419d

https://gratipay.news/pay-for-your-package-json-cb07341445ca

And here's the product page itself:

https://gratipay.com/on/npm/

Happy to draft some copy for you but it seems from an archive skim that you've pretty well got your own voice going. What else do you need from me on this? Any questions I can answer?

Thank you! :D

P.S. Tracking internally on our side on (public) GitHub.

[chadwhitacre]

Thanks for this. When we talked yesterday in the crosswalk, I had gotten the impression you were going on your 6-wk road trip before you ’d get the chance to iron out some known issues. On that basis, do you want us sending you users now (to help surface the bugs!) or after your return (when they’re fixed)?

Happy either way.

Thanks for flagging that. Do you have any rules of thumb in use at npm for how "perfect" something should be before driving traffic? My background is more in engineering than marketing and my hunch is that I'm prone to waiting longer than I should. :o)

I think I'll leave the question to marinate with the Gratipay community for a day or three before deciding. Interested in any advice in the meantime ...

[chadwhitacre]

Either works, provided you set adequate expectations. It’s definitely possible to invite people to get in at the ground floor on this cool new thing, to check it out and help its creators, etc etc etc. Where people might get a bit more prickly is if there’s any sort of inconsistent user experience around money collection, since this has a way of eroding trust.

Thanks, John. Let me get back to you next week on how to proceed ...

[chadwhitacre]

@mattbk in slack:

I agree that those bugfixes would take priority before npm weekly.

Namely:

• Broken URL links for npm packages with special characters?
• Strip markdown from npm descriptions
• Somehow record.nonce is not None
• Handle missing doc in npm change stream
• IntegrityError participants_email_address_key
• Mitigate npm spam/phishing

Also thinking:

• Move projects under participants in URL structure

This is from https://github.com/orgs/gratipay/projects/14?fullscreen=true.

[chadwhitacre]

Sent:

Looks like we're going to wait on some bugfixes. I'll ping you again in a bit? :-)

[chadwhitacre]

Let's broaden this to be about a marketing push, picking up from #1045.

http://blog.npmjs.org/post/163421115230/shutting-down-npm-irc points to a few more places to announce this (I've joined WeAllJS).

[chadwhitacre]

Probably we should think about JS conferences in 2018 vs. generalist enterprise-y ones (OSCON, OSSummit, ATO).

[chadwhitacre]

I've subscribed to http://javascriptweekly.com/.

[chadwhitacre]

Folding into #1160.