How Arduino empowers its community to contribute, and how this drives its business
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Welcome to Part Three of this three-part series into how Arduino created a viral hardware product:
Part I: How to set the foundation for an open source community and organisation
Part III: How to organise the community engines behind a successful open source movement
Today in Part III, we’ll cover:
Open Community Levers
Arduino Community Programs
How Arduino makes money
What’s the ROI on Arduino’s community investments?
How all of these programs come together
TL;DR: How can you replicate some of Arduino’s successes?
Read time: 14 minutes
Open Community Levers
So far, in parts I and II we’ve seen the principles and journey behind the creation of Arduino. But the real secret sauce behind a product that delights its users is in the way they’ve nurtured their community.
Despite the commonly held belief, if you share something in open source, people won’t automatically come. And even if you accidentally manage to attract a bunch of people, they won’t stay.
But Arduino understands this deeply. So they are not only asking their audience to contribute, but they have created lots of programmes that help their community become more skilled and engaged as they work with Arduino. Some of these programmes have worked, some haven’t, but the point has been to try many things and double down on what did.
Many communities think of paths to engage their community, like on the community commitment curve:
But, as Rosie Sherry says, a missing step after planning this commitment curve is investing in the programmes and people that will bring them to life.
So it’s not just about sharing an idea and expecting to get as much as we can out of the community, but really thinking ahead of time about how to make it sustainable and investing intentionally in programmes that will give the community the means to get a lot from its contributions.
Arduino’s programmes are so successful because they are based on the principles of “Teach and Learn”, and develop a culture of reciprocity. People will contribute to your project if you invest in them first. And the more Arduino taught, the more they learned not only about what they were doing but also about what people needed.
Inspired by Gareth Wilson and his great work at Community.inc, I’ve mapped some of their programmes through Gitlab’s Community Funnel, but the Arduino team probably has it’s own way of thinking about it.
The first three levels, awareness, interest, and intent, aren’t often considered community, and are mainly led by the company without community participation, but the next two, contribution and advocacy, are those where we can get the community involved and make the whole ecosystem richer.
Let’s dive into what this means in practice:
Community Programmes
Awareness
At the top of the funnel is awareness, or how to help people who don’t know your product or community discover it:
Relationships with key industry figures
At the beginning, they built their awareness through their networks of educators at design schools like Tom Igoe from NYU, distributors like Sparkfun or Adafruit, influencers like Make magazine, or their workshops at fablabs.
These key relationships have been able to create a worldwide presence for Arduino and turned its product into an essential piece of the maker toolbelt.
Open source Documentation
Once people discover Arduino exists, they need to know if they can trust it.
So to make it easy for people to look under the hood but also to learn on their own how to use it, it was crucial to share the software code and hardware design on Github and their website has helped attract tonnes of engineers interested in building something similar or understanding how it works.
Social Media
To increase awareness, little by little, they introduced different social media channels, like their blog, and channels on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Youtube, where they have hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of followers on each.
On these channels, they could share their new products and tutorials, and as more community projects popped up, Arduino could also showcase the work of other makers and inspire the community with what’s possible. More on that in a second.
Teachers Programmes
In 2016, they started a programme for teachers with kits and certifications that allowed them to put Arduino’s in the hands of their students and teach them about electronics.
Creating free resources for educators, like tutorials, live sessions, guides, and online tools, allows Arduino to scale the awareness of their product among students and ensure the future of the company.
Interest
The next level after making people aware of your product or community is interest, so you can make them want to learn more.
Workshops, books and courses
To help its audience understand the potential of Arduino, the founders started launching workshops at events in medialabs or makespaces, which later became the book “Getting started with Arduino.”
They have also created different education resources, from courses adapted by age and difficulty level to a learning path from high school to professional empowerment.
These courses are often supported by accompanying kits and certifications, and they also have easier-to-consume resources like the Eduvision Podcast, featuring inspirational guests, live demos, and how-to product tips.
For teachers, there are also Remote Learning tutorials they can use to teach students about their programmes.
Once users learn how to use Arduino’s, they have the tools to use it for themselves but also to contribute in the next stage.
Documentation and Project Tutorials
There is plenty of documentation that makes it simple for beginners to get started, and continue with Arduino tutorials or different community projects in the Project Hub.
Promoting Outside Community Creators and Tutorials
Then, as people started contributing and sharing their tutorials, Arduino promoted their work from outside platforms like Instructables, Flickr, or Delicious, and it also created featured creator profiles on Arduino’s blog and Youtube channel.
In April 2024, there were over 39 000 tutorials on Instructables.
This external promotion creates 3 benefits for Arduino and its community:
Showing social proof by showing what creators similar to their audience work on.
Creating more visibility for the creators and their tutorials encourages more people to share their work everywhere and, thus, drives more people to Arduino’s products.
Making Arduino products more valuable by enabling more people to create more things with the same product and creating new use cases that Arduino’s team hadn’t imagined or would not have the time and resources to develop.
Source: Arduino Uno Stars Youtube Playlist
Professional Use Cases
In the Professional section, there are plenty of IoT use cases to show what’s possible for companies.
This pro section opens Arduino beyond its maker community into the more “serious” industrial sector and has helped expand Arduino to new sectors like Aviation, Healthcare or industry automation.
Intent, Contribution & Advocacy
The last three levels in the funnel are intent, contribution, and advocacy.
The intent stage is where people start showing an intent to contribute to the community, although it’s still at a passive level.
By becoming contributors, members go from being passive observers to active creators by adding comments on the forum, reporting bugs, creating tutorials, organising Arduino days, and more.
Advocates are the most valuable community members, and thus, any organisation should most heavily invest in supporting them, as they are educating and attracting the most people to your company and community.
To start developing intent, contributions, and advocacy, the programmes are very similar to the previous ones, but instead of being passive, they first invite people to experience what others create, which develops a sense of reciprocity, and then invite people to actively create, support, and organise events.
Submit Tutorials
People can submit their tutorials in the Project Hub and gain visibility, a reputation, and feedback for their projects. In March 2024, there were 5353 submitted projects.
Organise local events
People can also participate, but they can also organise Arduino Days in their city or apply to become speakers and present an Arduino project. These are organised in hundreds of cities worldwide every year.
Code Contributions
After reading and copying the code, people also have a very clear contribution guide on Github to triage open issues, submit fixes, implementations, and new libraries, test open pull requests, help others by reviewing their contributions, report vulnerabilities, and write documentation.
These contribution guides and discussion spaces have enabled the community to bring 6 532 new libraries to life.
Community Support
First members can start passively reading the questions and answers others have already created on the Forum or Discord, and learn from them.
Then, as they have questions themselves, they can ask their questions, answer them, develop a reputation, and find peer support and camaraderie.
As I write this in March 2024, there are over 1.2 million users registered in the forum and over 50.000 registered on Discord.
User Groups
Arduino supports and invites people to organise their own meetups to bring makers together to learn electronics and share knowledge. In return, Arduino promotes the groups to the rest of the community and grows their groups, but it also facilitates discounts for its members, gives early access to new products and features, and sends stickers, certificates, and other goodies for the members, as well as participating in design challenges.
In 2024, there are 48 user groups listed worldwide.
Inspiration Labs
Teachers can apply to organise Inspiration Labs at their institution to set up spaces for students to collaborate, connect, share successes, and find support.
This education programme reinforces even more what teachers can do with their students and hopefully scales the number of students who learn with Arduino.
How does Arduino make money?
Counterintuitively, Arduino has always encouraged others to create other versions of their boards or copy them if they couldn’t find them in their countries.
But it has always been very protective of its brand and trademark to make sure people are sure that they are not buying a counterfeit but a quality product from Arduino, so they support open source values, and can get customer support in case of defects.
Physical Products
Arduino’s first business model was based on manufacturing and selling the boards through external companies, and Arduino LLC would get a royalty from them.
But as the products became more and more commoditised, the founders had to find creative ways to make money:
So they created offers for each:
Cloud Plans
To simplify and secure the way IoT projects are set up, Arduino offers different subscription plans available to run IoT projects on the cloud for individuals, schools, and businesses.
The school plan also gives access to the course library.
Education
To support education, Arduino developed different courses and kits from beginner to advanced.
And for students to prepare for their careers and prove the skills they learned through these courses, they sell certificates to assess their knowledge of programming, electronics, and Arduino with official online exams.
Pro Products
Finally, since the 2020s, Arduino released a dedicated offer to enable professionals to deploy projects in industrial IoT environments focused on performance, scalability, low power use and security.
All of these programmes and products might look a bit overwhelming to consider if you’re just starting, but keep in mind that these initiatives started as experiments and have been developed, improved, and even stopped over many years.
Arduino started multiple initiatives, but there were a lot of cofounders who were all familiar with open source ecosystems, so they could spread the responsibility of taking care of the different initiatives.
If you’re starting, it's important to focus on just one or two primary objectives for your community programme when you're first getting started and your community team is small.
Prioritise the areas that are most important for your organisation today.
Here’s a timeline to zoom out and consider how you can sequence your own community programmes:
Takeaways:
What community programmes can you set up to progressively create more awareness, interest, intent, contribution, and advocacy? Arduino first started small by being their own advocates and teaching others how to use their products. Little by little, they shared this role with their community, and this knowledge they shared empowered others to empower others to keep expanding the possibilities.
What products does your community need? What obstacles still make it painful or expensive to do what they need and want to learn or do?
Don’t do everything at once, but still plan ahead. Arduino started with a few products and community programmes at first to engage its community. But it still had a roadmap to little by little go from taking design students to engineers, and it started creating programmes and kits accordingly. Where does your community need your organisation to help them with your products and programmes?
Return on open community
Openness sounds very good and purposeful, but since we all have limited budgets, every team faced with a managing department has to answer a hard question: how can we best use the limited budget we have?
And even if justifying the value of open source can feel nebulous, it often starts with asking a few questions. What are our goals? How can we align that with the community? What initiatives can we build with that goal in mind and measure it, both from the point of view of the organisation and the community?
For Arduino, they’ve been able to drive a few results for themselves that drive present and future growth, but that also build its brand reputation and word of mouth. I’m not sure how Arduino measures their ROI, but for the sake of exploring, here are a few ways I think they could be doing it:
Growth: How many tutorials and new use cases are created on outside platforms like Instructables or Youtube, or blogs like Hackaday and Makezine? How many Arduino Day events are organised worldwide, and how many people participate in them? How many education programmes have been started, how many students did these reach, and how many kits were sold through them? How does this improve the number of new customers, conversion rate, onboarding success rate, and retention?
Support: How many questions are answered on the forum by the community vs on the customer support channel? How is it evolving our service experience ratings?
Product Improvement: How many libraries does the community create, and how much time and money would it cost to do the same R&D internally?
Customer Success: How are the community tutorials, trainings, and certification programmes impacting our adoption rate and average contract value?
Talent Sourcing: How many candidates come from the community channels vs non-community channels?
And it’s also healthy to be aware of the return the community is also getting from investing its contributions in the organisation :
Social Status and Influence: How many views and recognitions is Arduino driving for its contributors?
Training and education: How many users are finding jobs thanks to the skills they build with Arduino?
Better ROI and productivity: How many companies are starting and developing their products or tools to automate factories with Arduino?
Training and support: They can learn new skills that improve their careers
Relationships: How many relationships is Arduino developing for its members? How disappointed would they be if the community disappeared tomorrow?
It’s crucial to measure both sides to ensure the long-term health of your initiatives. If you’re only driving value for the organisation, the community will leave. If you only drive value for the community, the organisation won’t invest to support it.
Takeaways:
To find the resources you need to support your community initiatives, consider these questions:
What are our goals?
How can we align that with the community?
What initiatives can we build with that goal in mind and measure it, both from the point of view of the organisation and the community?
How it all comes together
Arduino has a lot going on, but it’s also not that complicated. In their catalogue, they made a simple visual that I find very helpful to see how the organisation gradually built itself.
From a solid community foundation that helped guide product and business development, they then added the education pillars for different difficulty levels, towards increasing professional opportunities for their users.
How can you replicate some of Arduino’s successes?
Arduino’s approach helped them grow to 30 million customers despite sharing their products in open source and even encouraging others to replicate their designs.
Here are the key takeaways you can borrow, modify and adapt for your business based on Arduino’s real life strategy and tactics:
1. Build programmes that support both your organisation and your community, then invite its members to collaborate
What can you put in motion for people to discover your project and want to learn more? What initiatives can you set up for your community to consume passively but also have the option to contribute and even lead the way? Start small, but have a vision of how your community evolves to create new programmes that support their journey as they improve their skills.
Arduino first started small by being their own advocates and teaching others how to create new things with their products through their open documentation and workshops. Little by little, they shared this role by empowering their community to start expanding what they could achieve together.
2. Get resources to develop open source and community initiatives by sharing the ROI of your programmes
Discuss with your team the goals of your organisation. How does your community align with them? Build initiatives with those goals in mind, and measure how the community is able to contribute to them. But invest for the long term. Community is a give-first approach.
Arduino’s community programmes have enabled the community to contribute a library of thousands of articles, videos and tutorials that have helped the team educate, attract and support millions of customers.
In return, Arduino has helped these members improve their skills and careers, but also drive visibility for their creations, increase their reputation and get feedback and support when they need it.
Sources
Keynote: Arduino & Linux: A Love Story - Massimo Banzi, Co-founder, Arduino Project
The Untold History of Arduino, by Hernando Barragán
The History and Evolution of Arduino, by Arthur Wang
How did it begin? The history of Arduino, by Device Plus
Story and History of Development of Arduino, by Circuits Today
Interview with Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino, by Arsenio Spadoni
Interview: Massimo Banzi, Codeveloper of Arduino, by Circuit Cellar
Interview with Massimo Banzi: cofounder of Arduino, by Postdigital Node
Arduino’s Massimo Banzi: How We Helped Make The Maker Movement, by Lauren Orsini in ReadWrite
Why open source hardware is(n't) working | David Cuartielles