Yesterday I said you could hire out your developer content production to Instacontent and that's fine. It's a viable approach when you're short on resources.

But I left out a key element: your ecosystem.

Your open-source product has an ecosystem – a community surrounding it (even a small one!).

So... it's not only you cooking meals at home, but it's also people bringing you meals.

Like... a content potluck!

People are coming to your house from all around: blogs, dev.to, Medium, Twitter, YouTube, egghead, Pluralsight, Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, self-published instructors, the list goes on and on.

And guess what, crowd-sourced developer content is pretty much exactly like a potluck. It comes with the good parts and the not-so-good parts.

Fred always brings the BEST banana bread. GIMME GIMME GIMME.

But Joan tends to bring strawberry rhubarb pie which no one really enjoys (sorry not sorry). You always encourage her to bring back her own leftovers under the guise of "oh but you should REALLY have it" and she never does (curses!) so in the garbagio it goes.

Unlike a potluck you invite people to, crowd-sourced content is more like... an open house that you can't close. For some of the people that show up, you have no idea where they source their ingredients (or worse, where they came from – who invited Garth?!). They might break your microwave re-heating their casserole, make something you hate (or worse, are allergic to), and swear in front of the kids. The nerve!

Luckily, a lot of developer content is created by people who are seriously interested in helping (and yet there are those less scrupulous). At least there's an incentive to put out good quality content for your product.

But, like hiring Instacontent, crowd-sourcing content is still giving up control.

And while many companies are fine with that, it doesn't change the fact that "Garth" is sleeping on your sofa tonight. Sweet dreams.

Have a lovely day night,
Kamran