Free marketing advice for MODX

I've only been using MODX for a couple of months, but that's been plenty of time for me to recognize its power (and vast superiority over WordPress). However, that's also been plenty of time for me to recognize some huge mistakes being made with regard to marketing and the general direction of the company.

I also noticed a new job position for a Marketing Director was posted ~24 hours ago, and after reading the content of that page...I'm pretty convinced that MODX is on a straight-and-narrow path toward mediocrity. That is, despite Ryan Thrash's recent post, MODX seems (IMO) very much destined to retain its title of The Best CMS No One's Heard Of. I almost applied for the Marketing Director position, but then I realized I'd be miserable working at a company that doesn't understand the following points.

Since I genuinely want to see MODX succeed, I've decided to post my thoughts and criticisms here. What makes me qualified to have an opinion on the matter? Well...on paper...nothing really. That's another reason I didn't apply. But I eat, sleep, and breath free software and open-source web development, and I've recently taken a particular interest in the economics of free software--so you'll just have to take my word for it: this is right up my alley.

Without further ado...here are the points I'd like to draw attention to.



1. Above all, an open-source CMS


This has to be the single most emphasized characteristic of MODX. Not Cloud...not creativity...not collaboration...not challenging paradigms. MODX is the best open-source CMS in the World. Period.

Why?

Because all your monetizable products and services (namely Cloud and Complete) are going to require one of two things to succeed:

-- Widespread adoption of self-hosted MODX (i.e., WordPress-style marketing)
-- Traditional marketing (i.e., like every other SaaS start-up out there)

In other words, your marketing strategy can be one of the following:

-- Make the best FREE open-source CMS on the planet. Make it appeal to the masses. Overthrow WordPress in terms of adoption rate and sheer number of users. Soft-sell premium products and services to the (theoretical) millions of people who adopt MODX.

-- Make the best cloud-hosted CMS on the planet. Make it appeal to designers, developers, and IT managers. Hard-sell through PPC, advertising, tech conferences, etc.

The first approach is the ONLY strategy that's win/win. It's a win for MODX because you now have millions of MODX users to market your premium services to. And it's a win for designers / developers because now there's a demand for MODX websites and we can actually make a living from using it, developing for it, and building websites with it. The most amazing CMS ever created does me no good unless I can personally monetize it.

Simply stated: developers will use whatever CMS the customer demands. Therefore, the best way for MODX to appeal to designers / developers is to appeal to the demographic that hires us: the masses.

Stop trying to win over designers and developers. Win over the masses--by creating the best FREE open-source CMS ever conceived--and everything else will follow. (Yes, I'm slightly borrowing from Google's mantra there.)



2. Nobody cares about Creative Freedom.


Personally, I like MODX's tagline. And I absolutely love the creative freedom that MODX provides. But...I'm a designer and a developer, so my opinion doesn't matter.

Why?

See #1.

To reiterate: MODX needs to appeal to the masses.

Well...that is unless MODX is perfectly content with their dismal market share. If MODX enjoys hiding in plain sight and being every designer's best-kept secret, then by all means...stick with Creative Freedom.

If MODX wants to garner the attention and market share it deserves, then it needs a tagline that sells itself to the most people--the masses. What do the masses want?

-- FREE ($)
-- Easy to use
-- Easy to get started
-- Easy to manage
-- SEO-friendly
-- Mobile-friendly
-- Fast

If you poll the next 1M people who choose a CMS or build a website and asked them what their #1 priority was...how many will tell you creative freedom?

I'm guessing < 1%.

It's important to me; it's important to the MODX community; but the demographic that matters most--the average, ignorant masses--do not give a flying f*** about creative freedom. They want the easiest, the cheapest, the fastest, and the most-documented.

If you're offering creative freedom or nothing, sure, creative freedom wins every time. But hold out creative freedom in one hand and 5-minute installation in the other and see what happens.



3. Worst. Vision. Ever.


The MODX company vision is:

Create amazing collaboration experiences for the people that build the web.

Wow...

For the last 6 years, I've been completely submerged in a world of online marketing, free software, web development, and tech start-ups...and this is by far the worst company vision I've ever heard of. There is so much that's wrong with this...I barely know where to begin.

First, let's look at how it's flawed in the context of point #1.

Collaboration. With this one word alone, you have completely disregarded the vast majority of the population and effectively made it company policy to remain a niche CMS that appeals to a niche market.

As a designer, developer, and writer...sure, I understand the value of "separation of concerns" and I've experienced first-hand the frustration of watching teammates / clients butcher my pixel-perfect layouts or arbitrarily change the entire site's URL structure. But for every website that struggles to achieve a convenient collaboration between its contributors, there are 10,000 websites being entirely managed by a single person.

So again, if people had to choose between amazing collaboration experiences or a punch in the nose, they'd opt for the former; does that make it a good candidate for the MODX company vision? Absolutely not.

It doesn't appeal to the masses, and therefore, it is not a reliable filter through which MODX should be basing its important decisions.

Next, let's address a false assumption contained within the vision statement.

The people that build the web. No no no...wrong attitude. And somewhat ignorant too. The people that build the web implies we're talking about a selective group, and therefore, it immediately pigeonholes MODX into a niche product--i.e., not suitable for mainstream adoption. This is the exact opposite of what MODX should be portraying itself as!

(I mean seriously...what kind of crazy world am I living in...where MODX is marketing itself as a niche CMS while WordPress is dominating the general-purpose CMS market?!)

And the reason it's slightly ignorant is because it fails to acknowledge the very obvious trend toward widespread tech literacy. In other words, 10 years from now...everyone will be online and will be managing their own websites. MODX has the potential to introduce powerful, intuitive website management to EVERYONE. Any company vision that sets its sights lower than that is unacceptable.

Lastly, let's look at that vision statement from a marketing perspective.

What demographic does it target?

Designers and developers. In other words, the people who appreciate the value of amazing collaboration experiences--the collaborators.

In general, who makes the decision to choose one CMS over another?

Everyone BUT the collaborators.

I say this based on my own experiences. Certainly there are scenarios where a client / customer says "I don't care what you use, just build me a site." But in my experience, the choice of CMS is usually dictated by other people or other factors (besides my personal preference).

And even though I know MODX is light years ahead of WordPress...I *still* find myself choosing WordPress over MODX for simple client websites. If nothing else, I know that the client will be able to find help after my contract is fulfilled.

Why do I choose WordPress, even though MODX is better?

Because WordPress is made for the masses!



Conclusion

Based on my personal and professional experience, I strongly believe that MODX as a company is headed in the wrong direction. And after reading Ryan's post and the Marketing Director job description, I'm convinced that MODX's marketing strategies are fundamentally flawed. I believe MODX is a solid enough product that it will be commercially successful--however, due to its lack of focus on being the best open-source CMS in existence, MODX will never achieve the kind of success that WordPress has seen, in terms of sheer numbers and adoption rate.



Okay, I'm done. Just wanted to get that off my chest.

</rant>

I have to say (with my marketing hat on), I disagree on all points.

Being open source does not work as a USP (Unique Selling Proposition) because there are so many open source CMS's in the world. OK, so you say you're the best open source CMS in the world -- so what? Everyone would say that about their own product. As a prospective user, I don't care how great you think you are. I want to know what can you give me that your competition can't, and the answer to that is "creative freedom."

Yeah, MODX should emphasize that it is open source (it would be a good idea to say that somewhere on the homepage), but you have to be more specific about what makes MODX different from other open source CMS's or your proposition is meaningless.

It's better to squarely face facts than to make business decisions on pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. The fact is, MODX is not going to be the next Wordpress any time soon. It doesn't matter how much better it is, Wordpress has too much momentum. That's just reality.

So you have to be realistic -- if you're a niche product, you have to be honest with yourself that you are a niche product, and you have to think about how to better appeal to your niche. If you can absolutely dominate your niche, then you start thinking about how to appeal to a broader audience.

The best strategic position for MODX to try to get into is to be the CMS that every professional developer and designer would love to use, if only they could convince their clients to let them. Then the developers and designers will do your marketing for you. Yeah, some clients will always want whatever is most popular, but others will say "give me what works best, I don't care if it's popular." And to that you say, "ah, so you want MODX..."

P.S. - It's worth noting that Wordpress didn't get where they are by setting out to be the best open source CMS in the world. Heck, they didn't even set out to be a CMS. They set out to be the best blogging platform in the world, which at the time was pretty niche. Wordpress has become popular as a general purpose CMS because they were able to completely dominate the blogosphere. [ed. note: esnyder last edited this post 14 years, 4 months ago.]

In my opinion (of course there are exceptions), clients generally have no idea what's good for them and can't be trusted to make decisions on platform, so it's up to the agency or designer/developer to figure out what matches the requirements. Just cause your client has heard about wordpress from their second niece who hacked together a site with that, doesn't mean it's the right choice, and that's why they pay the professionals for their web/mobile/etc presence.

I personally completely stand by Creative Freedom (and it really resonated with the people at the MODX Booth and comparison panels at the CMS Expo too) and the vision statement. Partially cause it may mean something completely different to the next user who comes along, while still being accurate.

Your feedback is really appreciated (even though I can't really agree with most of it either) - it helps to know what people are thinking. And hey, nothing wrong with a multi billion dollar niche! There's plenty of room in this market for systems to co-exist, as the CMS Expo showed.

Darren thanks so much for taking the time to share your thoughts. While I totally understand why you would think some of the things you wrote, the reality of the situation is quite different. I too share your passion for free software, having been heavily involved in the osCommerce community early on (I did a pure CSS port of it early on that rendered pages 40% faster), was around when Zencart got started (one of the first 15 or so folks involved), and have lived (literally) MODX since 2004.

On the WordPress front, having access to tens of millions of dollars to hire really talented people and build out data centers hasn't hurt their success either. Ditto for Drupal. (Both of which are great projects for the right type of jobs.) While we do have backing, we don't have those types of budgets—every dollar counts for a lot!

One the subject of Creative Freedom and whether it's appropriate (or working) and the markets we should pursue, well we'll just agree to disagree. I wish you could have been at CMS Expo and learned more about our strategy because I think you would have come to some very different conclusions. Ditto for our Vision.


There's 644M websites out there. We don't have to target the masses to be outrageously successful. Largest market share isn't always an indicator of the most successful companies. Think Nokia for consumer cell phones and RIM for businesses…

Would love to have a chance to talk in person some day, and for you to meet some of the team. Ever make it to Dallas?

This thread caught my eye for sure this morning.

Mark Hamstra makes a solid point on the matter, and meshes with my experience as a principal of a web studio, in that most of our clients either don't know or really don't care WHICH CMS is used, so long as it can adapt to their needs and fit within budget. With the "structure" of ModX, our studio can define not only the front end user experience of a web site with the full range of technologies available on the given stack, but also refine the backend manager to better jive with the client's comfort level.

At CMSExpo, most of what I heard from the other open-source CMS were how they were allowing some of the new technologies into the core, which seemed odd. No paradigm shifts to account for the changing content channel, no real epiphanies for developers to do their job faster. Just adding more stuff on top of systems. In this sense, ModX seems to have it right, and the idea may take a little time to set in fully. it is different, much like switching to git from svn (a personally scary switch I just did... thanks Mark H), where one moves from a rigid framework to one that allows multiple ways to achieve a single goal.

The question Darren raises (IMO) is if MODX really fullfill it's goals using this strategy in some, not too long, time (let's say few years) and the answer is probably no. Because the rest of the world will not wait.

MODX presence at EMS Expo was (I assume great success, but it is marketing. It's pure virtual success unless MODX really does what it suppose to offer (now!) and does it well.

Current strategy and marketing looks good, at least to attract people closer, but will they stay ? hmm...

Good to see some objective voice from outside.

http://modx.com/blog/2012/05/25/clarity-focus-and-simplicity/