We have a product. Developers can build things against our product. We’ve started to see that developers are sharing with each other in the community, these solutions they’re building. We created a category a year or two ago called “Show and Tell” where our developers can share these things they’re building with each other—and it has gone over quite well.
We’re now growing enough in maturity that our partners, ourselves, and even some high-value community developers, want to take their “marketplace item” to the next level—and so we want to build an elevated experience for that. Here’s some things I know for sure:
- This won’t be paid, so no need to worry about paid access or payments
- All integrations provided in the marketplace will be open-source and hosted in GitHub
- There is a finite list of what types of integrations they can submit (essentially product feature A, product feature B, product feature C, and Other…these are each subcategories in the marketplace category.)
- I want to have every marketplace item in the form of a Discourse topic, like plugin or theme-component.
- There will be a gated submission process to get an item onto the marketplace. Your item should be of high-enough caliber to be consider a marketplace item versus a Show and Tell item.
Here’s what I’ve done so far:
Submission Process
To submit an item to the marketplace, you first have to request access to the “Marketplace Publishers” user group, and in your request you share a link to the open-source repository of your item and a description of what it is. That request goes to the marketplace publishers user group owners in a group PM (standard discourse feature). Of course in here, they can communicate about what the person wants to publish, review their code, etc.
Once we approve, we build the marketplace item with them in the PM using a Discourse Template of our marketplace items. We can get the image right, description, getting started guide, etc.
After that, our team publishes the item to the marketplace (only our team or approved company employees can publish new topics in this category).
It would be great if the Automation “send pms” allowed the sender to be a user group or a list of users. We could possibly use it to do something like:
Hey, %%RECEIVER_USERNAME%%, I just wanted to say thank you for working to become a marketplace author. It’s a great way to showcase your technical prowess or that of your business.We’ll work with you in this private message right here on the next steps to get you going. Here are the next things I need you to do so we can get your item on the SailPoint marketplace:
- a
- b
- c
Usage Process
From the end user perspective, they will use the marketplace item almost exactly like we use theme components and plugins here on Meta.
Things I’m Struggling With (or needing to figure out)
- I’m trying to figure out how to handle bugs/feature requests for marketplace items. Do I use bug and feature categories, and create an associated tag for every marketplace item? Or do I only do that for official plugins, and let community/partner-built plugins handle them in their topics? The former means a lot of tag management but would make tracking great…but I’m cautious about creating too many tags. The latter is a disjointed experience depending on the marketplace item you’re engaging with and can make it hard to find what current bugs/feature requests exist if the OP isn’t keeping the original topic post updated.
- I need to figure out how users of a marketplace item get updates about changes to the marketplace item. If they are subscribed to a specific topic (marketplace item), do they get updates if the OP is updated? Would everyone subscribed get updates if it was a wiki?
- I need the best way I can come up with for users to acknowledge our terms of services. I currently have it linked right at the top of the topic, in bold, but I think my legal team will want it to actually pop-up to users before they go and download/use the item. Not sure what to do here…
- Ability for users to rate the marketplace item, and that rating be available for us to pull via API, see who rated what, etc.
- Possibly a theme component for both the category and the topic that better visualizes the category as a “marketplace” and a “marketplace item” and not a discussion/forum-like view.
- I’m sure there are things that I haven’t considered, so please poke some holes in this if you want
