TL;DR: Most "developer marketing agencies" are B2B SaaS shops that swapped LinkedIn for a Slack logo. For an open source project, that mismatch shows up fast: they'll pitch you gated ebooks and MQLs when what you actually need is a GitHub README that converts, a Discord that doesn't die after launch week, and someone who can tell the difference between a star and a user. Here's the checklist I use.
I got asked this question again last week: "how do we find a marketing agency that actually gets open source?" It comes up a lot, and the honest answer is that most agencies don't, because open source funnels don't look like B2B SaaS funnels.
In SaaS, you're chasing a form fill. In open source, the "conversion" is someone typing npm install or git clone with zero sales interaction, often months before anyone at the company even knows they exist. An agency built around lead gen dashboards will misread that as no pipeline, when it's actually the exact thing you should be optimizing for.
Why the generic agency pitch falls apart here
Ask a typical dev marketing agency how they'd grow an open source repo and you'll usually get some version of: blog content, a whitepaper, some paid LinkedIn, maybe a webinar. None of that is wrong exactly, it's just built for a buyer who reads whitepapers. Your actual audience is reading your source code, your issue tracker, and your CONTRIBUTING.md before they read anything you publish.
Three things an OSS-focused agency has to understand that a generalist usually doesn't:
Stars aren't the metric, but they're not nothing either. A repo can have 8,000 stars and 40 real weekly active users, or 800 stars and 4,000 active users, depending on whether the growth came from a Hacker News spike or word of mouth in a niche community. An agency that treats stars as the KPI will optimize for the wrong spike.
The docs are marketing. Not "supported by" marketing, they are the primary conversion surface. If someone can't get from your quickstart to a working example in under five minutes, no amount of content will save the funnel.
Community channels have a half-life. A Discord or Slack that gets seeded at launch and then goes quiet for six weeks looks worse than never having one. Someone has to own daily presence, answering the same beginner question for the fortieth time without it reading as scripted.
Questions worth asking before you sign anything
I'd ask an agency these directly, on the call, before looking at a single deck:
- Walk me through how you'd grow a repo from 200 to 2,000 real users, not stars. If the answer stays at the star level, that's the tell.
- What's your plan for Hacker News and Reddit specifically? Not "we do social," the actual subreddits and the actual posting cadence, and whether they understand that self-promotional posts get removed fast in most dev communities.
- Who writes the technical content, and have they shipped code recently? Content written by someone who has never opened a terminal reads as exactly that to a developer audience.
- How do you measure "activation" for an open source project? First successful build, first PR merged, first issue filed, whatever it is, they should have a specific answer, not "engagement."
- What happens to the contributor funnel, not just the user funnel? Good OSS marketing also has to get people from user to contributor, which is a separate, harder problem most agencies never touch.
- Show me one repo you've actually worked on. Not a logo on a slide, the actual before/after numbers, with a source you can check. If two or more of those get a vague answer, that's useful information on its own.
Where to actually start looking
I put together a longer comparison of agencies that specifically work with GitHub-first, open source products, including what each one is actually good at versus what they claim to be good at, in this rundown of GitHub marketing agencies for open source companies. Worth a read before you take a single sales call, since it'll save you from asking the six questions above to someone who already fails the first filter.
The distribution side matters just as much as who you hire. I wrote separately about how to route every channel (docs, Reddit, Hacker News, package registries) back to the repo instead of scattering effort across platforms that don't feed the funnel, in this piece on content distribution for open source devtools. It's the framework I'd want any agency to already understand before they touch your repo.
The honest disclosure
I work on developer marketing day to day, including for open source and devtool projects, so take the framing here with that in mind. I'm not naming my own company as "the answer," the six questions above should work regardless of who you end up talking to. If you want to see how we think about it specifically, the developer marketing agency page has more detail, but the checklist stands on its own without it.
Discussion: if you've hired an agency for an open source project before, what's the one question you wish you'd asked before signing? I'm especially curious whether anyone's found a good way to evaluate the community-management side before committing, since that's the piece I see get the least scrutiny upfront.
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