Pinpoint and prioritize: How ProjectDiscovery used Common Room to map its open-source ecosystem

Background

ProjectDiscovery is an open-source cybersecurity company that helps security engineers and developers resolve vulnerabilities quickly and scalably. Its wide range of software—designed to help enterprise organizations defend their technology stacks—is built on a foundation of open-source innovation.

Keep reading to learn how ProjectDiscovery:

• Increased visibility into product users
• Improved engagement across Discord, GitHub, and other digital channels
• Surfaced enterprise sales opportunities in its open-source ecyosystem

Shed light on open-source users

The people who make up ProjectDiscovery’s open-source ecosystem—70,000 strong and counting—are spread across digital channels, including GitHub, X (Twitter), Discord, and YouTube.

“Without this community, these tools and this company don’t exist,” said Pj Metz, Developer Community Manager at ProjectDiscovery. “Our templates for Nuclei, our flagship tool, are written by the community. The reason Nuclei and other ProjectDiscovery tools are so valuable is because of the community investing time and effort in making these templates and contributing to the tools.”

A thriving community is every open-source company’s dream. It not only fuels product awareness and adoption, it also provides go-to-market teams with valuable insights.

But visibility is a challenge.

Open-source companies have a limited view of the users accessing their software. And when a product has lots of traction among open-source users, it’s difficult to keep up with all the activity and decide what to follow up on.

This made it hard for ProjectDiscovery to stay responsive and prioritize opportunities.

The company tried using various tools—from native platforms to point solutions—to get a handle on its open-source ecosystem, but they all fell short.

“We weren’t able to see a unified view across the various platforms, so it didn’t really add value for us,” said Brendan O’Leary, Head of Community at ProjectDiscovery.

Add user identity to user intent

The team at ProjectDiscovery signed up for a free trial of Common Room to compare it to other solutions available on the market.

Common Room’s identity resolution capabilities quickly set it apart.

“We have a wide range of community members—from individual bug bounty hunters all the way to security engineers at large Fortune 500 companies,” Brendan said. “These folks interact with us and other community members in lots of different ways—through GitHub, Discord, and various social media platforms.”

Using AI-powered identity resolution and enrichment, Common Room automatically created a unified profile for every individual and organization that engages with ProjectDiscovery across channels. This provided the company with a centralized view of all digital activity—as well as the people behind it.

“Before Common Room, we didn’t have a way to bring together all of those identities to understand who was in our community, what their needs were, and how we could better serve them,” Brendan said.

Using filters, the team can quickly drill down into this data to explore its open-source ecosystem and learn more about the people and companies that comprise it.

With a few clicks, ProjectDiscovery can identify users who match an ideal customer persona, see which tools are in a user’s tech stack, and even highlight economic buyers active in its community.

Playbook

Identify top contributors and ideal customers in your GitHub repo

Lift the veil on your GitHub repo beyond basic data.

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Connect the dots between community and enterprise

As ProjectDiscovery prepared to release its enterprise product, it wanted to know which open-source users might be a good fit for its offering.

That’s difficult to do on channels where anonymity is the norm, such as Discord.

Enter Common Room’s automated Discord verification workflow.

Playbook

Enrich Discord user profiles with community verification

Enrich member profiles to get full visibility into your community.

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Using a prebuilt and customizable template, the team at ProjectDiscovery created a workflow that automatically verifies Discord users during the onboarding process and collects key firmographic information. This helped the company spotlight high-fit users for its enterprise product.

“Currently we have a workflow where users can only unlock the rest of the server after going through Discord verification through Common Room,” Pj said. “We were able to gather emails and connections to community members we didn’t know about before. To date, around 500 people have used the verification.”

Users who may be a good fit for outreach can be added to dedicated segments where customer-facing teams can easily track and report on activity, as well as reach out when the time is right.

While automated Discord verification solved one problem, ProjectDiscovery also needed a way to keep pace with activity on GitHub. That’s where Common Room’s real-time alerts came in.

Using team alerts, the company can automatically stay up to date on any and all GitHub activity. Customizable triggers and filters make it easy for ProjectDiscovery to zero in on the people and actions it wants to know about. Meanwhile, the ability to choose where notifications are sent means the team gets notified in the places where it already works.

This makes it much easier to quickly triage any issues, as well as maintain visibility into potential upsell signals.

“Every time something is posted to one of our multiple projects in GitHub, either an issue or a discussion or a PR, an alert gets sent to one of two channels in our Slack,” Pj said. “Part of my daily work is to go through those in Slack, check out the issue, and see if it’s something the community team can help with or if it needs one of the engineers or open-source team members to help.”

Playbook

Automate your GitHub triage process

Quickly find and prioritize GitHub activity that needs a response.

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Results

In terms of visibility into ProjectDiscovery’s open-source ecosystem, there’s the time before Common Room and the time after Common Room.

“The integrations with Discord and GitHub have been critical to helping us expand our understanding of our community and how members interact with each other and our tools,” Brendan said.

This comprehensive view into activity across digital channels—and the firmographic information of the organizations behind it—has also made it easier to surface commercial opportunities.

Playbook

Add community-qualified leads (CQLs) to your funnel

Introduce a new source of high-intent leads into the mix.

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“The most valuable discovery that Common Room helped us make was understanding which large organizations have been using and are most engaged with our tools,” Brendan said. “They adopt us because we work for their needs and their workflows—and enterprises may be willing to pay for a premium version tailored to their organization. Common Room allows us to spot those opportunities and follow up accordingly.”

Developers use ProjectDiscovery because its powerful integrations and automations help them work faster, smarter, and better. ProjectDiscovery relies on Common Room for the same reasons.

Turn open-source into a competitive advantage with Common Room

Ready to see how Common Room helps you zero in on high-value opportunities in your open-source community?