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Open Core Ventures Handbook/🎁Open Source Community

Open Source Community

Building a commercial company around an open source project gives you an immediate audience, but it doesn’t give you immediate access to that audience. You need to find a way to reach them. For example, you can’t expect a project maintainer to give you access to their email distribution list just because you are building around the same project. They may have no initial interest in partnering with you or promoting your product.
Some ways to reach your built-in open source audience:
  1. Community contributions: Spend time making meaningful contributions to the project and helping other contributors out.
  1. Services instead of alternatives: Provide services to the project through hosting the project or working on the specific needs of businesses using the project.
  1. Content marketing: Write about the project and how you’re contributing to it, using it, or planning to improve it. It gives the project and your company visibility with the audience.
  1. Hacker news: Join Hacker News and start engaging with relevant conversations and creating content the community would find interesting enough to share and comment on. Use “Show HN” to share something you’ve made that people can interact with. “Ask HN” when you have questions the HN community can help you out with.

Telemetry value exchange

Telemetry should be on by default, with an option for users to opt out. Otherwise, most users won’t enable it. When adding telemetry to an open source project, you need to include a value exchange for the user. For example, when users have telemetry turned on, it checks if they are on the latest version, and users get automatic vulnerability alerts.
Example message
We see # installations getting hacked, so we’re showing vulnerabilities in the interface. You can enable these proprietary features if you share more data with us. Enable telemetry to get automatic notifications when there’s a security vulnerability.

Community contributions

To be efficient with capital, build with the community. Engaging the open source community around your project and product is an advantage for open core companies—use it!
Plant seeds by shipping a small minimally viable change (MVC) and asking the community to help mature it. Shipping incomplete functionality to expand scope often goes against instincts. However, planting those seeds, even in an incomplete state, allows others to see the path and contribute. With others contributing, iterations happen faster. While MVCs come with a low level of shame, they allow the wider community to contribute and people to express interest.

Increasing contributions

  1. Keep review turnaround time under a week. The faster the turnaround time, the more encouraged people will be to keep working on your project.
  1. Generate awareness of your project through content marketing.
  1. Host a hackathon. If you don’t already have a significant social following, you can host a hackathon Devpost.com Hackathon.io, and Dev.to
  1. Start a discourse forum. It’s good for SEO and you can create a custom domain for your forum.

Improving contribution acceptance rates

General guidelines when you (the founder) are the only or primary maintainer:
  1. Give the community direction by generating high-priority issues for them to work on.
  1. Hire a contributor success person to review and manage community contributions.
  1. Provide documentation with guidelines and tips for contributors.
Specific guidelines for when the project is (1) maintained by someone else, (2) maintained by a foundation or separate company, or (3) PRs/MRs need to go through a lengthy approval process because the project is mature or there are many approvers:
  1. If a foundation or a community of maintainers maintains your open source project, help maintainers by providing resources.
  1. Pair someone with the maintainer when he goes through it on a Zoom call (live) and do a write-up of what was wrong, and in the next MR, share what you changed.
  1. Instead of asking them to document => pair with someone to do the documentation for them
  1. Help improve the processes and culture that slow PR review and acceptance.
  1. Working with open source projects
Building a commercial company around an open source project gives you an immediate audience but it doesn’t give you immediate access to that audience. You need to find a way to reach them. For example, you can’t expect a project maintainer to give you access to their email distribution list just because you are building around the same project. They may have no initial interest in partnering with you or promoting your product.
Some ways to reach your built-in open source audience:
  1. Community contributions: Spend time making meaningful contributions to the project and helping other contributors out.
  1. Services instead of alternatives: Provide services to the project through hosting the project or working on the specific needs of businesses using the project.
  1. Content marketing: Write about the project and how you’re contributing to it, using it, or planning to improve it. It gives the project and your company visibility with the audience.
  1. Hacker news: Join Hacker News and start engaging with relevant conversations and creating content the community would find interesting enough to share and comment on. Use “Show HN” to share something you’ve made that people can interact with. “Ask HN” when you have questions the HN community can help you out with.

Competitors in open source

Given the nature of most OCV companies, we may encounter competitors contributing to or leveraging the same underlying open source project.
The general guideline is to accept competitors’ code contributions if they’re good. Faulty codes and/or if they’re difficult for the open source community to maintain would be reasons to reject or request rework.