Customer Case Study: Typesense
Typesense is an open-source, typo-tolerant search engine that delivers fast and relevant results out of the box. The OSS product has more than 18,000 stars on GitHub, and they also host a managed solution via Typesense Cloud.
Typesense reached out to Freeman & Forrest to build a 4-week influencer campaign with the following goals:
Raise awareness that Typesense is an OSS alternative to Algolia and an easier, more cost-effective alternative to Elasticsearch
Drive high-quality traffic to the Typesense GitHub repository from the web and back-end software development communities
Generate more examples of innovative OSS projects using Typesense
Jason Bosco, cofounder of Typesense, said: “I've been following Forrest Brazeal for a while on Twitter, and have always appreciated the quality of dev-focused content he publishes. So when he announced that he was starting a company with Emily Freeman to help companies connect with dev influencers, I reached out right away. Forrest and Emily understand what type of content engages sophisticated developers and also motivates influencers to talk about it.”
Delivering an outcome-based partnership
Freeman & Forrest worked with Typesense to build objective measurements for campaign success: in this case, a minimum number of relevant influencers to work with and a target count of high-value impressions generated from the campaign.
Jason said, “I like how the campaign was structured with well-defined metrics that we could use to track progress and outcomes. The level of granularity at which we could see the impact of each activation was especially helpful, to determine which audience we were resonating with.”
Freeman & Forrest then matched Typesense with 5 trusted influencers within their budget, totaling more than 300,000 followers in the modern software development niche, and designed an influencer marketing campaign covering two major phases.
Phase 1: Brand Awareness
Freeman & Forrest created a custom graphic illustrating Typesense’s position in the search engine product space and shared it organically on social media. The graphic was particularly well-received on Reddit, where it reached the front page of the popular r/programmerhumor subreddit and was viewed more than 200,000 times in the first 48 hours.
Even better, Typesense was able to see their product positioning reflected back to them through the community, as in this comment thread:
Phase 2: Brand Engagement
Freeman & Forrest partnered with several credible influencers to drive traffic to the Typesense GitHub repository through social media posts, email newsletter mentions, and other open-source projects.
For example, AWS DevTools Hero Jared Short built a working demo project illustrating Typesense’s semantic search capabilities and created a follow-up blog post that was read more than 10,000 times.
Freeman & Forrest measured link clicks and impressions for each unique influencer and distribution channel and provided aggregated stats to Typesense at the end of the 4-week period.
Results
Despite the limited budget and time window of the campaign, Freeman & Forrest was able to deliver more than 600% of the target impressions established for baseline success.
“Going into our pilot campaign, I had very high expectations on the type of content that would come out,” said Jason. “I was thrilled to see that Freeman and Forrest actually exceeded the highest of my expectations! The messaging was on point, and the quality of the output spoke for itself by going viral.”
He added: “I'm excited about our continued partnership with Freeman and Forrest. They say what they'll do and then go out and get it done and then some more.”
You can design your own partnership with Freeman & Forrest by reaching out to us today.
