Services

You could sum up the services we provide under the usual headers: business consulting, marketing, PR and media relations, and community building. We could differentiate ourselves by highlighting our team’s technical skills to support everything from strategy and market positioning; through documentation, tutorials and technical writing; to experienced pre-sales and project delivery
Age of Peers (AoP) delivers all these services and more, but this doesn’t really capture the essence of what we do. In reality, we merge skills from these areas, to answer our clients’ real community and business needs.

GLOBAL REACH

We appreciate that, once it’s in the wild, open source software often spreads around the globe faster than the organisation that is developing and supporting it. AoP offers virtually all aspects required to enter, build, sustain and service new markets around Europe and in the US, with a broader network of contacts that stretches far beyond.

Whether you need expert guidance for localised planning and strategy; ombudsmen on the ground to represent you and handle presales; local community managers; multilingual marcoms and media relations to raise awareness; or tech teams implement and support your solution, chances are we can offer you a safe, very experienced, pair of hands.  

GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGY

The right plan is always the best starting point. AoP has helped many start-ups and existing organisations to build and execute strong business models around open source, free culture and the collaborative economy.

Licensing experts, community managers, economists, management consultants, successful entrepreneurs, marketers, and your potential end users: our global team provides access to the advice, skills and experience needed.

Services extend from short bespoke workshops to address your specific challenges, through to building comprehensive strategies that combine business planning, community building, marketing and communications.

BRAND, MESSAGING & POSITIONING

When you are trading copyright and patent rights, in return for the benefits of an open business model, your brand and identity becomes a vital asset. An genuine, meaningful brand identity is as key to successful community development as it is in marketing.

Brand identity is at the core of much of what we do at AoP. Many of our services in marketing communications, media relations and community-building draw from the brand and add back to its evolution.

We also offer dedicated workshops and consulting to help build new brands, strengthen existing ones; to develop messaging and positioning that maximises your competitive advantage.

THOUGHT LEADERSHIP: MEDIA & COMMUNICATIONS

Modern media, events organisers and your online/social audience are all hungry for thought-provoking content. Strong thought leadership is one of the most effective ways to engage and inspire your audience.

At AoP, we work with our clients to turn their existing skills, knowledge and insight, into media coverage, speaker opportunities and compelling resources for online community outreach.  

We are all engaged by material that we can connect to and that helps us with our own real-world challenges. People are inspired by clear new ideas, which they can build on themselves.

Our innovative tools and methodology help do the leg work, turning assets you own into meaningful dialogue with the people you need to talk with.

TECHNICAL MARKETING: USER & DEVELOPER OUTREACH

Building a business around Open Source gives you a key advantage: people can try it, use it and adapt it. You just need to give them a reason: we specialise in giving them reasons!

By combining community relations with technical marketing, we help projects gain rapid access to large existing communities and markets. We start with knowledgeable targeting, and follow up with introductions to help our clients engage in the type meaningful dialogue and collaboration that wins hearts and minds.

If needed, our team can then support with development and API integration. Where we come into our own, is in building compelling documentation and targeted tutorials for use in media outreach, speaker opportunities, blogs, webinars and direct community outreach.

Whether you’re looking to onboard new developers, build a community of users and superusers, or drive existing users in the direction of your commercial offerings, open source success is about help not not hype marketing.

PRE-SALES, PROJECT DELIVERY AND SUPPORT SERVICES

Our [DevOps/Technical] team has a wealth of experience in evaluating, purchasing, implementing and supporting open source software in some of the most demanding enterprise corporate environments. This makes them an incredibly useful resource for our clients: who better to bring into a  branding and positioning workshop that the person you will be targeting?

But we leave them to their own devices, they are usually found engaging in some form of technical pre-sales, project delivery and ongoing support. Clearly, we don’t have an in-house team capable of handling any application in any language. But we do have some of the most experienced and well connected technical project managers in the Open Source space. So, if you’re fearful of starting from a blank page with a foreign recruitment agency, we may already know the people you need.