OSS 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.

2. Services instead of alternatives: Provide services to the project through hosting the project or working on the specific needs of businesses using the project.

3. 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.

4. Hacker News: Join Hacker News and start engaging with relevant conversations and creating content that 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 that the HN community can help you with.

Improve the open source code faster than before

A common community concern when companies form around open source projects is that development will slow down as resources get diverted to proprietary features. It’s important that the open source part of the codebase expands more rapidly than it did before the company existed. Most of the people at your company are net new. As long as one of them sometimes adds something to the open source codebase, the open source codebase should be better off.

Value creation over reputation management

Many founders get paralyzed by concerns about how the community will perceive their commercialization efforts. The best way to maintain community trust is to consistently deliver value through your open source contributions and maintain transparency in your approach. If you're contributing meaningfully to the open source project and being transparent about your business model, the community will generally respond positively.

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 the 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.

2. Generate awareness of your project through content marketing.

3. 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

4. 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.

2. Hire a contributor success person to review and manage community contributions.

3. Provide documentation with guidelines and tips for contributors.

Specific guidelines for when the project is maintained by someone else, maintained by a foundation or separate company, or 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.

2. 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.

3. Instead of asking them to document => pair with someone to do the documentation for them

4. Help improve the processes and culture that slow PR review and acceptance.

5. Working with open source projects

Competitor contributions

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.

Become the obvious choice

Make your software more user-friendly than alternatives. Make your open source offering better than other open source options in the same space. When you become the default choice for open source users, converting them to paid plans becomes much easier. You want people to come to you regardless of whether they are looking for open source software or a paid product.

Don't be afraid of competition. If a large company like Microsoft is adopting your technology, embrace it and use it to establish yourself as the expert. If competitors are white-labeling your software without attribution, make sure everyone knows it is based on what you made. Make a page on your website that lists all the companies building on your software. Make your company look as big as possible. Then, look at what they're selling, as it’s probably an indicator of demand. Look at which ones are successful and what they are selling, and go build that.